essay on nuclear war

Here’s How Bad a Nuclear War Would Actually Be

W e know that an all-out U.S.-Russia nuclear war would be bad. But how bad, exactly? How do your chances of surviving the explosions, radiation, and nuclear winter depend on where you live? The past year’s unprecedented nuclear saber-rattling and last weekend’s chaos in Russia has made this question timely. To help answer it, I’ve worked with an amazing interdisciplinary group of scientists (see end credits) to produce the most scientifically realistic simulation of a nuclear war using only unclassified data, and visualize it as a video . It combines detailed modeling of nuclear targeting, missile trajectories, blasts and the electromagnetic pulse, and of how black carbon smoke is produced, lofted and spread across the globe, altering the climate and causing mass starvation.

As the video illustrates, it doesn’t matter much who starts the war: when one side launches nuclear missiles, the other side detects them and fires back before impact. Ballistic missiles from U.S. submarines west of Norway start striking Russia after about 10 minutes, and Russian ones from north of Canada start hitting the U.S. a few minutes later. The very first strikes fry electronics and power grids by creating an electro-magnetic pulse of tens of thousands of volts per meter. The next strikes target command-and-control centers and nuclear launch facilities. Land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles take about half an hour to fly from launch to target.

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Major cities are targeted both because they contain military facilities and to stymie the enemy’s post-war recovery. Each impact creates a fireball about as hot as the core of the sun, followed by a radioactive mushroom cloud. These intense explosions vaporize people nearby and cause fires and blindness further away. The fireball expansion then causes a blast wave that damages buildings, crushing nearby ones. The U.K. and France have nuclear capabilities and are obliged by NATO’s Article 5 to defend the U.S. so, Russia hits them too. Firestorms engulf many cities, where storm-level winds fan the flames, igniting anything that can burn, melting glass and some metals and turning asphalt into flammable hot liquid.

Unfortunately, peer-reviewed research suggests that explosions, the electromagnetic pulse, and the radioactivity aren’t the worst part: a nuclear winter is caused by the black carbon smoke from the nuclear firestorms. The Hiroshima atomic bomb caused such a firestorm, but today’s hydrogen bombs are much more powerful. A large city like Moscow, with almost 50 times more people than Hiroshima, can create much more smoke, and a firestorm that sends plumes of black smoke up into the stratosphere, far above any rain clouds that would otherwise wash out the smoke. This black smoke gets heated by sunlight, lofting it like a hot air balloon for up to a decade. High-altitude jet streams are so fast that it takes only a few days for the smoke to spread across much of the northern hemisphere.

This makes Earth freezing cold even during the summer, with farmland in Kansas cooling by about 20 degrees centigrade (about 40 degrees Fahrenheit), and other regions cooling almost twice as much. A recent scientific paper estimates that over 5 billion people could starve to death, including around 99% of those in the US, Europe, Russia, and China – because most black carbon smoke stays in the Northern hemisphere where it’s produced, and because temperature drops harm agriculture more at high latitudes.

It’s important to note that huge uncertainties remain, so the actual humanitarian impact could be either better or worse – a reason to proceed with caution. A recently launched $4M open research program will hopefully help clarify public understanding and inform the global policy conversation, but much more work is needed, since most of the research on this topic is classified and focused on military rather than humanitarian impacts.

We obviously don’t know how many people will survive a nuclear war. But if it’s even remotely as bad as this study predicts, it has no winners, merely losers. It’s easy to feel powerless, but the good news is that there is something you can do to help: please help share this video! The fact that nuclear war is likely to start via gradual escalation, perhaps combined by accident or miscalculation, means that the more people know about nuclear war, the more likely we are to avoid having one.

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The Devastating Effects of Nuclear Weapons

What can nuclear weapons do? How do they achieve their destructive purpose? What would a nuclear war — and its aftermath — look like? In the article that follows, excerpted from Richard Wolfson and Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress’s book “ Nuclear Choices for the Twenty-First Century ,” the authors explore these and related questions that reveal the most horrifying realities of nuclear war.

A Bomb Explodes: Short-Term Effects

The most immediate effect of a nuclear explosion is an intense burst of nuclear radiation, primarily gamma rays and neutrons. This direct radiation is produced in the weapon’s nuclear reactions themselves, and lasts well under a second. Lethal direct radiation extends nearly a mile from a 10-kiloton explosion. With most weapons, though, direct radiation is of little significance because other lethal effects generally encompass greater distances. An important exception is the enhanced-radiation weapon, or neutron bomb, which maximizes direct radiation and minimizes other destructive effects.

An exploding nuclear weapon instantly vaporizes itself. What was cold, solid material microseconds earlier becomes a gas hotter than the Sun’s 15-million-degree core. This hot gas radiates its energy in the form of X-rays, which heat the surrounding air. A fireball of superheated air forms and grows rapidly; 10 seconds after a 1-megaton explosion, the fireball is a mile in diameter. The fireball glows visibly from its own heat — so visibly that the early stages of a 1-megaton fireball are many times brighter than the Sun even at a distance of 50 miles. Besides light, the glowing fireball radiates heat.

This thermal flash lasts many seconds and accounts for more than one-third of the weapon’s explosive energy. The intense heat can ignite fires and cause severe burns on exposed flesh as far as 20 miles from a large thermonuclear explosion. Two-thirds of injured Hiroshima survivors showed evidence of such flash burns. You can think of the incendiary effect of thermal flash as analogous to starting a fire using a magnifying glass to concentrate the Sun’s rays. The difference is that rays from a nuclear explosion are so intense that they don’t need concentration to ignite flammable materials.

The intense heat can ignite fires and cause severe burns on exposed flesh as far as 20 miles from a large thermonuclear explosion.

As the rapidly expanding fireball pushes into the surrounding air, it creates a blast wave consisting of an abrupt jump in air pressure. The blast wave moves outward initially at thousands of miles per hour but slows as it spreads. It carries about half the bomb’s explosive energy and is responsible for most of the physical destruction. Normal air pressure is about 15 pounds per square inch (psi). That means every square inch of your body or your house experiences a force of 15 pounds. You don’t usually feel that force, because air pressure is normally exerted equally in all directions, so the 15 pounds pushing a square inch of your body one way is counterbalanced by 15 pounds pushing the other way. What you do feel is overpressure , caused by a greater air pressure on one side of an object.

If you’ve ever tried to open a door against a strong wind, you’ve experienced overpressure. An overpressure of even 1/100 psi could make a door almost impossible to open. That’s because a door has lots of square inches — about 3,000 or more. So 1/100 psi adds up to a lot of pounds. The blast wave of a nuclear explosion may create overpressures of several psi many miles from the explosion site. Think about that! There are about 50,000 square inches in the front wall of a modest house — and that means 50,000 pounds or 25 tons of force even at 1 psi overpressure. Overpressures of 5 psi are enough to destroy most residential buildings. An overpressure of 10 psi collapses most factories and commercial buildings, and 20 psi will level even reinforced concrete structures.

People, remarkably, are relatively immune to overpressure itself. But they aren’t immune to collapsing buildings or to pieces of glass hurtling through the air at hundreds of miles per hour or to having themselves hurled into concrete walls — all of which are direct consequences of a blast wave’s overpressure. Blast effects therefore cause a great many fatalities. Blast effects depend in part on where a weapon is detonated. The most widespread damage to buildings occurs in an air burst , a detonation thousands of feet above the target. The blast wave from an air burst reflects off the ground, which enhances its destructive power. A ground burst , in contrast, digs a huge crater and pulverizes everything in the immediate vicinity, but its blast effects don’t extend as far. Nuclear attacks on cities would probably employ air bursts, whereas ground bursts would be used on hardened military targets such as underground missile silos. As you’ll soon see, the two types of blasts have different implications for radioactive fallout.

How far do a weapon’s destructive effects extend? That distance — the radius of destruction — depends on the explosive yield. The volume encompassing a given level of destruction depends directly on the weapon’s yield. Because volume is proportional to the radius cubed, that means the destructive radius grows approximately as the cube root of the yield. A 10-fold increase in yield then increases the radius of destruction by a factor of only a little over two. The area of destruction grows faster but still not in direct proportion to the yield. That relatively slow increase in destruction with increasing yield is one reason why multiple smaller weapons are more effective than a single larger one. Twenty 50-kiloton warheads, for example, destroy nearly three times the area leveled by a numerically equivalent 1-megaton weapon.

What constitutes the radius of destruction also depends on the level of destruction you want to achieve. Roughly speaking, though, the distance at which overpressure has fallen to about 5 psi is a good definition of destructive radius. Many of the people within this distance would be killed, although some wouldn’t. But some would be killed beyond the 5-psi distance, making the situation roughly equivalent to having everyone within the 5-psi circle killed and everyone outside surviving. The image to the left shows how the destructive zone varies with explosive yield for a hypothetical explosion. This is a simplified picture; a more careful calculation of the effects of nuclear weapons on entire populations requires detailed simulations that include many environmental and geographic variables.

The blast wave is over in a minute or so, but the immediate destruction may not be. Fires started by the thermal flash or by blast effects still rage, and under some circumstances they may coalesce into a single gigantic blaze called a firestorm that can develop its own winds and thus cause the fire to spread. Hot gases rise from the firestorm, replaced by air rushing inward along the surface at hundreds of miles per hour. Winds and fire compound the blast damage, and the fire consumes enough oxygen to suffocate any remaining survivors.

During World War II, bombing of Hamburg with incendiary chemicals resulted in a firestorm that claimed 45,000 lives. The nuclear bombing of Hiroshima resulted in a firestorm; that of Nagasaki did not, likely because of Nagasaki’s rougher terrain. The question of firestorms is important not only to the residents of a target area: Firestorms might also have significant long-term effects on the global climate, as we’ll discuss later.

Both nuclear and conventional weapons produce destructive blast effects, although of vastly different magnitudes. But radioactive fallout is unique to nuclear weapons. Fallout consists primarily of fission products, although neutron capture and other nuclear reactions contribute additional radioactive material. The term fallout generally applies to those isotopes whose half-lives exceed the time scale of the blast and other short-term effects. Although fallout contamination may linger for years and even decades, the dominant lethal effects last from days to weeks, and contemporary civil defense recommendations are for survivors to stay inside for at least 48 hours while the radiation decreases.

The fallout produced in a nuclear explosion depends greatly on the type of weapon, its explosive yield, and where it’s exploded. The neutron bomb, although it produces intense direct radiation, is primarily a fusion device and generates only slight fallout from its fission trigger. Small fission weapons like those used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki produce locally significant fallout. But the fission-fusion-fission design used in today’s thermonuclear weapons introduces the new phenomenon of global fallout . Most of this fallout comes from fission of the U-238 jacket that surrounds the fusion fuel. The global effect of these huge weapons comes partly from the sheer quantity of radioactive material and partly from the fact that the radioactive cloud rises well into the stratosphere, where it may take months or even years to reach the ground. Even though we’ve had no nuclear war since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, fallout is one weapons effect with which we have experience. Atmospheric nuclear testing before the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty resulted in detectable levels of radioactive fission products across the globe, and some of that radiation is still with us.

Fallout differs greatly depending on whether a weapon is exploded at ground level or high in the atmosphere. In an air burst, the fireball never touches the ground, and radioactivity rises into the stratosphere. This reduces local fallout but enhances global fallout. In a ground burst, the explosion digs a huge crater and entrains tons of soil, rock, and other pulverized material into its rising cloud. Radioactive materials cling to these heavier particles, which drop back the ground in a relatively short time. Rain may wash down particularly large amounts of radioactive material, producing local hot spots of especially intense radioactivity. A hot spot in Albany, New York, thousands of miles from the 1953 Nevada test that produced it, exposed area residents to some 10 times their annual background radiation dose. The exact distribution of fallout depends crucially on wind speed and direction; under some conditions, lethal fallout may extend several hundred miles downwind of an explosion. However, it’s important to recognize that the lethality of fallout quickly decreases as short-lived isotopes decay.

Recommended Response to a Nuclear Explosion

The United States government has recently provided guidance on how to respond to a nuclear detonation. One recommendation is to divide the region of destruction due to blast effects into three separate damage zones. This division provides guidance for first responders in assessing the situation. Outermost is the light damage zone , characterized by “broken windows and easily managed injuries.” Next is the moderate damage zone with “significant building damage, rubble, downed utility lines and some downed poles, overturned automobiles, fires, and serious injuries.” Finally, there’s the severe damage zone , where buildings will be completely collapsed, radiation levels high, and survivors unlikely.

The recommendations also define a dangerous fallout zone spanning different structural damage zones. This is the region where dose rates exceed a whole-body external dose of about 0.1 Sv/hour. First responders must exercise special precautions as they approach the fallout zone in order to limit their own radiation exposure. The dangerous fallout zone can easily stretch 10 to 20 miles (15 to 30 kilometers) from the detonation depending on explosive yield and weather conditions.

Electromagnetic Pulse

A nuclear weapon exploded at very high altitude produces none of the blast or local fallout effects we’ve just described. But intense gamma rays knock electrons out of atoms in the surrounding air, and when the explosion takes place in the rarefied air at high altitude this effect may extend hundreds of miles. As they gyrate in Earth’s magnetic field, the electrons generate an intense pulse of radio waves known as an electromagnetic pulse (EMP).

A single large weapon exploded some 200 miles over the central United States could blanket the entire country with an electromagnetic pulse intense enough to damage computers, communication systems, and other electronic devices. It could also affect satellites used for military communications, reconnaissance, and attack warning. The EMP phenomenon thus has profound implications for a military that depends on sophisticated electronics. In 1962, the United States detonated a 1.4-megaton warhead 250 miles above Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean. People as far as Australia and New Zealand witnessed the explosion as a red aurora appearing in the night sky. Hawaiians, only 800 miles from the island, experienced a bright flash followed by a green sky and the failure of hundreds of street lights. In total, the Soviet Union and the United States conducted 20 tests of EMP from nuclear detonations. However, it’s unclear how to extrapolate the results to today’s more sensitive and more pervasive electronic equipment.

Since the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 it has been virtually impossible to study EMP effects directly, although elaborate devices have been developed to mimic the electronic impact of nuclear weapons. Increasingly, crucial electronic systems are “hardened” to minimize the impact of EMP. Nevertheless, the use of EMP in a war could wreak havoc with systems for communication and control of military forces.

Many countries are around the world are developing high-powered microwave weapons which, although not nuclear devices, are designed to produce EMPs. These directed-energy weapons , also called e-bombs , emit large pulses of microwaves to destroy electronics on missiles, to stop cars, to detonate explosives remotely, and to down swarms of drones. Despite these EMP weapons being nonlethal in the sense that there’s no bang or blast wave, an enemy may be unable to distinguish their effects from those of nuclear weapons.

Would the high-altitude detonation of a nuclear weapon to produce EMP or the use of a directed-beam EMP weapon be an act of war warranting nuclear retaliation? With its electronic warning systems in disarray, should the EMPed nation launch a nuclear strike on the chance that it was about to be attacked? How are nuclear decisions to be made in a climate of EMP-crippled communications? These are difficult questions, but military strategists need to have answers.

Nuclear War

So far we’ve examined the effects of single nuclear explosions. But a nuclear war would involve hundreds to thousands of explosions, creating a situation for which we simply have no relevant experience. Despite decades of arms reduction treaties, there are still thousands of nuclear weapons in the world’s arsenals. Detonating only a tiny fraction of these would cause mass casualties.

What would a nuclear war be like? When you think of nuclear war, you probably envision an all-out holocaust in which adversaries unleash their arsenals in an attempt to inflict the most damage. Many people — including your authors — believe that misfortune to be the likely outcome of almost any use of nuclear weapons among the superpowers. But nuclear strategists have explored many scenarios that fall short of the all-out nuclear exchange. What might these limited nuclear wars be like? Could they really remain limited ?

Limited Nuclear War

One form of limited nuclear war would be like a conventional battlefield conflict but using low-yield tactical nuclear weapons. Here’s a hypothetical scenario: After its 2014 annexation of Crimea, Russia attacks a Baltic country with tanks and ground forces while the United States is distracted by a domestic crisis. NATO responds with decisive counterforce, destroying Russian tanks with fighter jets, but this doesn’t quell Russian resolve. Russia responds with even more tanks and by bombing NATO installations, killing several hundred troops. NATO cannot tolerate such aggression and to prevent further Russian advance launches low-yield tactical nuclear weapons with their dial-a-yield positions set to the lowest settings of only 300 tons TNT equivalent. The goal is to signal Russia that it has crossed a line and to deescalate the situation. NATO’s actions are based on fear that if the Russian aggression weren’t stopped the result would be all-out war in northern Europe.

This strategy is actually being discussed in the higher echelons of the Pentagon. The catchy concept is that use of a few low-yield nuclear weapons could show resolve, with the hoped-for outcome that the other party will back down from its aggressive behavior (this concept is known as escalate to deescalate ). The assumption is that the nuclear attack would remain limited, that parties would go back to the negotiating table, and that saner voices would prevail. However, this assumes a chain of events where everything unfolds as expected. It neglects the incontrovertible fact that, as the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz observed in the 19th century, “Three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.” Often coined fog of war , this describes the lack of clarity in wartime situations on which decisions must nevertheless be based. In the scenario described, sensors could have been damaged or lines of communication severed that would have reported the low-yield nature of the nuclear weapons. As a result, Russia might feel its homeland threatened and respond with an all-out attack using strategic nuclear weapons, resulting in millions of deaths.

There is every reason to believe that a limited nuclear war wouldn’t remain limited.

There is every reason to believe that a limited nuclear war wouldn’t remain limited. A 1983 war game known as Proud Prophet involved top-secret nuclear war plans and had as participants high-level decision makers including President Reagan’s Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. The war game followed actual plans but unexpectedly ended in total nuclear annihilation with more than half a billion fatalities in the initial onslaught — not including subsequent deaths from starvation. The exercise revealed that a limited nuclear strike may not achieve the desired results! In this case, that was because the team playing the Soviet Union responded to a limited U.S. nuclear strike with a massive all-out nuclear attack.

What about an attack on North Korea? In 2017, some in the U.S. cabinet advocated for a “bloody nose” strategy in dealing with North Korea’s flagrant violations of international law. This is the notion that in response to a threatening action by North Korea, the U.S. would destroy a significant site to “bloody Pyongyang’s nose.” This might employ a low-yield nuclear attack or a conventional attack. The “bloody nose” strategy relies on the expectation that Pyongyang would be so overwhelmed by U.S. might that they would immediately back down and not retaliate. However, North Korea might see any type of aggression as an attack aimed at overthrowing their regime, and could retaliate with an all-or-nothing response using weapons of mass destruction (including but not necessarily limited to nuclear weapons) as well as their vast conventional force.

In September 2017, during the height of verbal exchanges between President Trump and the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, the U.S. flew B-1B Lancer bombers along the North Korean coast, further north of the demilitarized zone than the U.S. had ever done, while still staying over international waters. However, North Korea didn’t respond at all, making analysts wonder whether the bombers were even detected. Uncertainty in North Korea’s ability to discriminate different weapon systems might exacerbate a situation like this one and could lead the North Koreans viewing any intrusion as an “attack on their nation, their way of life and their honor.” This is exactly how the Soviet team in the Proud Prophet war game interpreted it.

What about a limited attack on the United States? Suppose a nuclear adversary decided to cripple the U.S. nuclear retaliatory forces (a virtual impossibility, given nuclear missile submarines, but a scenario considered with deadly seriousness by nuclear planners). Many of the 48 contiguous states have at least one target — a nuclear bomber base, a submarine support base, or intercontinental missile silos — that would warrant destruction in such an attack. The attack, which would require only a tiny fraction of the strategic nuclear weapons in the Russian arsenal, could kill millions of civilians. Those living near targeted bomber and submarine bases would suffer blast and local radiation effects. Intense fallout from ground-burst explosions on missile silos in the Midwest would extend all the way to the Atlantic coast. Fallout would also contaminate a significant fraction of U.S. cropland for up to year and would kill livestock. On the other hand, the U.S. industrial base would remain relatively unscathed, if no further hostilities occurred.

In contrast to attacking military targets, an adversary might seek to cripple the U.S. economy by destroying a vital industry. In one hypothetical attack considered by the congressional Office of Technology Assessment, ten Soviet SS-18 missiles, each with eight 1-megaton warheads, attack United States’ oil refineries. The result is destruction of two-thirds of the U.S. oil-refining capability. And even with some evacuation of major cities in the hypothetical crisis leading to the attack, 5 million Americans are killed.

Each of these “limited” nuclear attack scenarios kills millions of Americans — many, many times the 1.2 million killed in all the wars in our nation’s history. Do we want to entertain limited nuclear war as a realistic possibility? Do we believe nuclear war could be limited to “only” a few million casualties? Do we trust the professional strategic planners who prepare our possible nuclear responses to an adversary’s threats? What level of nuclear preparedness do we need to deter attack?

All-Out Nuclear War

Whether from escalation of a limited nuclear conflict or as an outright full-scale attack, an all-out nuclear war remains possible as long as nuclear nations have hundreds to thousands of weapons aimed at one another. What would be the consequences of all-out nuclear war?

Within individual target cities, conditions described earlier for single explosions would prevail. (Most cities, though, would likely be targeted with multiple weapons.) Government estimates suggest that over half of the United States’ population could be killed by the prompt effects of an all-out nuclear war. For those within the appropriate radii of destruction, it would make little difference whether theirs was an isolated explosion or part of a war. But for the survivors in the less damaged areas, the difference could be dramatic.

Consider the injured. Thermal flash burns extend well beyond the 5-psi radius of destruction. A single nuclear explosion might produce 10,000 cases of severe burns requiring specialized medical treatment; in an all-out war there could be several million such cases. Yet the United States has facilities to treat fewer than 2,000 burn cases — virtually all of them in urban areas that would be leveled by nuclear blasts. Burn victims who might be saved, had their injuries resulted from some isolated cause, would succumb in the aftermath of nuclear war. The same goes for fractures, lacerations, missing limbs, crushed skulls, punctured lungs, and myriad other injuries suffered as a result of nuclear blast. Where would be the doctors, the hospitals, the medicines, the equipment needed for their treatment? Most would lie in ruin, and those that remained would be inadequate to the overwhelming numbers of injured. Again, many would die whom modern medicine could normally save.

A single nuclear explosion might produce 10,000 cases of severe burns requiring specialized medical treatment; in an all-out war there could be several million such cases.

In an all-out war, lethal fallout would cover much of the United States. Survivors could avoid fatal radiation exposure only when sheltered with adequate food, water, and medical supplies. Even then, millions would be exposed to radiation high enough to cause lowered disease resistance and greater incidence of subsequent fatal cancer. Lowered disease resistance could lead to death from everyday infections in a population deprived of adequate medical facilities. And the spread of diseases from contaminated water supplies, nonexistent sanitary facilities, lack of medicines, and the millions of dead could reach epidemic proportions. Small wonder that the international group Physicians for Social Responsibility has called nuclear war “the last epidemic.”

Attempts to contain damage to cities, suburbs, and industries would suffer analogously to the treatment of injured people. Firefighting equipment, water supplies, electric power, heavy equipment, fuel supplies, and emergency communications would be gone. Transportation into and out of stricken cities would be blocked by debris. The scarcity of radiation-monitoring equipment and of personnel trained to operate it would make it difficult to know where emergency crews could safely work. Most of all, there would be no healthy neighboring cities to call on for help; all would be crippled in an all-out war.

Is Nuclear War Survivable?

We’ve noted that more than half the United States’ population might be killed outright in an all-out nuclear war. What about the survivors?

Recent studies have used detailed three-dimensional, block-by-block urban terrain models to study the effects of 10-kiloton detonations on Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. The results settle an earlier controversy about whether survivors should evacuate or shelter in place: Staying indoors for 48 hours after a nuclear blast is now recommended. That time allows fallout levels to decay by a factor of 100. Furthermore, buildings between a survivor and the blast can block the worst of the fallout, and going deep inside an urban building can lower fallout levels still further. The same shelter-in-place arguments apply to survivors in the non-urban areas blanketed by fallout.

These new studies, however, consider only single detonations as might occur in a terrorist or rogue attack. In considering all-out nuclear war, we have to ask a further question: Then what?

Individuals might survive for a while, but what about longer term, and what about society as a whole? Extreme and cooperative efforts would be needed for long-term survival, but would the shocked and weakened survivors be up to those efforts? How would individuals react to watching their loved ones die of radiation sickness or untreated injuries? Would an “everyone for themselves” attitude prevail, preventing the cooperation necessary to rebuild society? How would residents of undamaged rural areas react to the streams of urban refugees flooding their communities? What governmental structures could function in the postwar climate? How could people know what was happening throughout the country? Would international organizations be able to cope?

Staying indoors for 48 hours after a nuclear blast is now recommended. That time allows fallout levels to decay by a factor of 100.

Some students of nuclear war see postwar society in a race against time. An all-out war would have destroyed much of the nation’s productive capacity and would have killed many of the experts who could help guide social and physical reconstruction. The war also would have destroyed stocks of food and other materials needed for survival.

On the other hand, the remaining supplies would have to support only the much smaller postwar population. The challenge to the survivors would be to establish production of food and other necessities before the supplies left from before the war were exhausted. Could the war-shocked survivors, their social and governmental structure shattered, meet that challenge? That is a very big nuclear question — so big that it’s best left unanswered, since only an all-out nuclear war could decide it definitively.

Climatic Effects

A large-scale nuclear war would pump huge quantities of chemicals and dust into the upper atmosphere. Humanity was well into the nuclear age before scientists took a good look at the possible consequences of this. What they found was not reassuring.

The upper atmosphere includes a layer enhanced in ozone gas, an unusual form of oxygen that vigorously absorbs the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation. In the absence of this ozone layer , more ultraviolet radiation would reach Earth’s surface, with a variety of harmful effects. A nuclear war would produce huge quantities of ozone-consuming chemicals, and studies suggest that even a modest nuclear exchange would result in unprecedented increases in ultraviolet exposure. Marine life might be damaged by the increased ultraviolet radiation, and humans could receive blistering sunburns. More UV radiation would also lead to a greater incidence of fatal skin cancers and to general weakening of the human immune system.

Even more alarming is the fact that soot from the fires of burning cities after a nuclear exchange would be injected high into the atmosphere. A 1983 study by Richard Turco, Carl Sagan, and others (the so-called TTAPS paper) shocked the world with the suggestion that even a modest nuclear exchange — as few as 100 warheads — could trigger drastic global cooling as airborne soot blocked incoming sunlight. In its most extreme form, this nuclear winter hypothesis raised the possibility of extinction of the human species. (This is not the first dust-induced extinction pondered by science. Current thinking holds that the dinosaurs went extinct as a result of climate change brought about by atmospheric dust from an asteroid impact; indeed, that hypothesis helped prompt the nuclear winter research.)

The original nuclear winter study used a computer model that was unsophisticated compared to present-day climate models, and it spurred vigorous controversy among atmospheric scientists. Although not the primary researcher on the publication, Sagan lent his name in order to publicize the work. Two months before Science would publish the paper, he decided to introduce the results in the popular press. This backfired, as Sagan was derided by hawkish physicists like Edward Teller who had a stake in perpetuating the myth that nuclear war could be won and the belief that a missile defense system could protect the United States from nuclear attack. Teller called Sagan an “excellent propagandist” and suggested that the concept of nuclear winter was “highly speculative.” The damage was done, and many considered the nuclear winter phenomenon discredited.

But research on nuclear winter continued. Recent studies with modern climate models show that an all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia, even with today’s reduced arsenals, could put over 150 million tons of smoke and soot into the upper atmosphere. That’s roughly the equivalent of all the garbage the U.S. produces in a year! The result would be a drop in global temperature of some 8°C (more than the difference between today’s temperature and the depths of the last ice age), and even after a decade the temperature would have recovered only 4°C. In the world’s “breadbasket” agricultural regions, the temperature could remain below freezing for a year or more, and precipitation would drop by 90 percent. The effect on the world’s food supply would be devastating.

Even a much smaller nuclear exchange could have catastrophic climate consequences. The research cited above also suggests that a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, involving 100 Hiroshima-sized weapons, would shorten growing seasons and threaten annual monsoon rains, jeopardizing the food supply of a billion people. The image below shows the global picture one month after this hypothetical 100-warhead nuclear exchange.

Nuclear weapons have devastating effects. Destructive blast effects extend miles from the detonation point of a typical nuclear weapon, and lethal fallout may blanket communities hundreds of miles downwind of a single nuclear explosion. An all-out nuclear war would leave survivors with few means of recovery, and could lead to a total breakdown of society. Fallout from an all-out war would expose most of the belligerent nations’ surviving populations to radiation levels ranging from harmful to fatal. And the effects of nuclear war would extend well beyond the warring nations, possibly including climate change severe enough to threaten much of the planet’s human population.

Debate about national and global effects of nuclear war continues, and the issues are unlikely to be decided conclusively without the unfortunate experiment of an actual nuclear war. But enough is known about nuclear war’s possible effects that there is near universal agreement on the need to avoid them. As the great science communicator and astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “It’s elementary planetary hygiene to clean the world of these nuclear weapons.” But can we eliminate nuclear weapons? Should we? What risks might such elimination entail? Those are the real issues in the ongoing debates about the future of nuclear weaponry.

Richard Wolfson is Benjamin F. Wissler Professor of Physics at Middlebury College. Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress is Scientist-in-Residence at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. This article is excerpted from their book “ Nuclear Choices for the Twenty-First Century: A Citizen’s Guide. “

air burst A nuclear explosion detonated at an altitude—typically, thousands of feet—that maximizes blast damage. Because its fireball never touches the ground, an air burst produces less radioactive fallout than a ground burst.

blast wave An abrupt jump in air pressure that propagates outward from a nuclear explosion, damaging or destroying whatever it encounters.

direct radiation Nuclear radiation produced in the actual detonation of a nuclear weapon and constituting the most immediate effect on the surrounding environment.

electromagnetic pulse (EMP) An intense burst of radio waves produced by a high-altitude nuclear explosion, capable of damaging electronic equipment over thousands of miles.

fallout Radioactive material, mostly fission products, released into the environment by nuclear explosions.

fireball A mass of air surrounding a nuclear explosion and heated to luminous temperatures.

firestorm A massive fire formed by coalescence of numerous smaller fires.

ground burst A nuclear explosion detonated at ground level, producing a crater and significant fallout but less widespread damage than an air burst.

nuclear difference Phrase we use to describe the roughly million-fold difference in energy released in nuclear reactions versus chemical reactions.

nuclear winter A substantial reduction in global temperature that might result from soot injected into the atmosphere during a nuclear war.

overpressure Excess air pressure encountered in the blast wave of a nuclear explosion. Overpressure of a few pounds per square inch is sufficient to destroy typical wooden houses.

radius of destruction The distance from a nuclear blast within which destruction is near total, often taken as the zone of 5-pound-per-square-inch overpressure.

thermal flash An intense burst of heat radiation in the seconds following a nuclear explosion. The thermal flash of a large weapon can ignite fires and cause third-degree burns tens of miles from the explosion.

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What is a nuclear weapon?

A nuclear weapon is a device designed to release energy in an explosive manner as a result of nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, or a combination of the two processes.

Are there treaties to control the proliferation of nuclear weapons?

Concerns about the devastating effects of nuclear weapons have driven governments to negotiate arms control agreements. Some of the earliest ones include the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty of 1963 and the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons of 1968.

When was a nuclear weapon first tested?

The first test of a nuclear weapon occurred in the United States on July 16, 1945, at the Alamogordo Bombing Range in south-central New Mexico. The test was code-named Trinity.

The Soviet Union had the most nuclear weapons during the Cold War. The Soviet stockpile reached a peak of about 33,000 operational warheads in 1988, with an additional 10,000 previously deployed warheads that had been retired but not dismantled. The U.S. stockpile reached its peak in 1966 with more than 32,000 nuclear warheads.

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nuclear weapon , device designed to release energy in an explosive manner as a result of nuclear fission , nuclear fusion , or a combination of the two processes. Fission weapons are commonly referred to as atomic bombs . Fusion weapons are also referred to as thermonuclear bombs or, more commonly, hydrogen bombs; they are usually defined as nuclear weapons in which at least a portion of the energy is released by nuclear fusion.

Nuclear weapons produce enormous explosive energy. Their significance may best be appreciated by the coining of the words kiloton (1,000 tons) and megaton (1,000,000 tons) to describe their blast energy in equivalent weights of the conventional chemical explosive TNT . For example, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima , Japan , in 1945, containing only about 64 kg (140 pounds) of highly enriched uranium , released energy equaling about 15 kilotons of chemical explosive. That blast immediately produced a strong shock wave , enormous amounts of heat, and lethal ionizing radiation . Convection currents created by the explosion drew dust and other debris into the air, creating the mushroom-shaped cloud that has since become the virtual signature of a nuclear explosion. In addition, radioactive debris was carried by winds high into the atmosphere, later to settle to Earth as radioactive fallout . The enormous toll in destruction, death, injury, and sickness produced by the explosions at Hiroshima and, three days later, at Nagasaki was on a scale never before produced by any single weapon . In the decades since 1945, even as many countries have developed nuclear weapons of far greater strength than those used against the Japanese cities, concerns about the dreadful effects of such weapons have driven governments to negotiate arms control agreements, such as the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty of 1963 and the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons of 1968. Among military strategists and planners, the very presence of these weapons of unparalleled destructive power has created a distinct discipline , with its own internal logic and set of doctrines, known as nuclear strategy .

The first nuclear weapons were bombs delivered by aircraft. Later, warheads were developed for strategic ballistic missiles, which have become by far the most important nuclear weapons. Smaller tactical nuclear weapons have also been developed, including ones for artillery projectiles, land mines , antisubmarine depth charges , torpedoes , and shorter-range ballistic and cruise missiles .

By far the greatest force driving the development of nuclear weapons after World War II (though not by any means the only force) was the Cold War confrontation that pitted the United States and its allies against the Soviet Union and its satellite states. During this period, which lasted roughly from 1945 to 1991, the American stockpile of nuclear weapons reached its peak in 1966, with more than 32,000 warheads of 30 different types. During the 1990s, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, many types of tactical and strategic weapons were retired and dismantled to comply with arms control negotiations, such as the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks , or as unilateral initiatives . By 2010 the United States had approximately 9,400 warheads of nine types, including two types of bombs, three types for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), two types for submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and two types for cruise missiles . Some types existed in several modifications. Of these 9,400 warheads, an estimated 2,468 were operational (that is, mated to a delivery system such as a missile); the rest were either spares held in reserve or retired warheads scheduled to be dismantled. Of the 2,468 operational warheads, approximately 1,968 were deployed on strategic (long-range) delivery systems, and some 500 were deployed on nonstrategic (short-range) systems. Of the 500 nonstrategic warheads in the U.S. arsenal, about 200 were deployed in Europe.

The Soviet nuclear stockpile reached its peak of about 33,000 operational warheads in 1988, with an additional 10,000 previously deployed warheads that had been retired but had not been taken apart. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russia accelerated its warhead dismantlement program, but the status of many of the 12,000 warheads estimated to remain in its stockpile in 2010 was unclear. Given limited Russian resources and lack of legitimate military missions, only about 4,600 of these 12,000 warheads were serviceable and maintained enough to be deployed. Of the 4,600 operational warheads, some 2,600 were deployed on strategic systems and some 2,000 on nonstrategic systems. A global security concern is the safety of Russia ’s intact warheads and the security of nuclear materials removed from dismantled warheads.

Beginning in the 1990s, the arsenals of the United Kingdom , France , and China also underwent significant change and consolidation. Britain eliminated its land-based army, tactical naval, and air nuclear missions, so that its arsenal, which contained some 350 warheads in the 1970s, had just 225 warheads in 2010. Of these, fewer than 160 were operational, all on its ballistic missile submarine fleet. Meanwhile, France reduced its arsenal from some 540 operational warheads at the end of the Cold War to about 300 in 2010, eliminating several types of nuclear weapon systems. The Chinese stockpile remained fairly steady during the 1990s and then started to grow at the beginning of the 21st century. By 2010 China had about 240 warheads in its stockpile, some 180 of them operational and the rest in reserve or retirement.

Israel maintained an undeclared nuclear stockpile of 60 to 80 warheads, but any developments were kept highly secret. India was estimated to have 60 to 80 assembled warheads and Pakistan about 70 to 90. Most of India’s and Pakistan’s warheads were thought not to be operational, though both countries—rivals in the incipient arms race on the Indian subcontinent—were thought to be increasing their stockpiles. North Korea , which joined the nuclear club in 2006, may have produced enough plutonium by 2010 for as many as 8 to 12 warheads, though it was not clear that any of these was operational.

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Events, news & press, the history of nuclear warfare and the future of nuclear energy.

The first atomic strike in 1945 changed the world forever.

On August 6, 1945, the world changed forever when the first atomic bomb hit Hiroshima, Japan, killing thousands of people instantly. Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, decisively ending Japan’s involvement in World War II. Thousands of people died from radiation poisoning within a year. Since that earth-shattering day, the world has grappled with a controversial technology that not only poses strategic risks in its ability to wipe out humanity but also provides a potential solution to problems of sustainable energy.  

The Hoover Institution has a long relationship with nuclear history. The Library & Archives house the original strike orders and footage taken of the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, acquired from Harold Agnew, along with his papers. Agnew worked at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory during World War II and was an observer on The Great Artiste , a B-29 that flew behind the Enola Gay on the first atomic strike mission. The Agnew atomic bomb footage is the most-requested motion picture film in Hoover’s collections. His papers include newspaper clippings from the time documenting how people grappled with the news of the attack. The clippings evince an air of newfound terror tinged with fascination about nuclear technology. The Library & Archives also house collections of newspapers from the Marshall Islands during the nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll in the 1940s and 1950s, and the papers of nuclear physicist Edward Teller and nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter, as well as some of the papers of physicist Sidney Drell.

Since the first atomic bomb dropped, world leaders have been forced to contend with the strategic reality of nuclear arms. Few understand this better than former secretary of state and Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow George Shultz. In his book Learning from Experience , Shultz wrote about his vision for global nuclear disarmament:

Out of office and out of Washington, I and my good friends and colleagues Sid Drell, Henry Kissinger, Bill Perry, and Sam Nunn try to keep the flame burning so that when and if the global atmosphere improves, the ideas stand ready to help lessen our dependence on nuclear weapons with their ability to wipe out humanity.

From the beginning of our appeals, my colleagues and I have stressed that the world is complicated. We highlight the regional conflicts that would have to be settled. We point out that a world without nuclear weapons would not be the world as it is, minus nuclear weapons. Steps to create the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons cannot be ignored. For Instance, conflicts have driven decisions to acquire nuclear weapons in Northeast Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. ( Learning from Experience , pp. 86–87)

Today, Hoover fellows including George Shultz, Admiral James O. Ellis Jr., Jim Timbie, Jeremy Carl, James Goodby, and many others continue to research and consider the risks of nuclear arms, while also recognizing the benefits of nuclear energy. Ellis and Shultz write , “Nuclear power alone will not solve our energy problems. But we do not think they can be solved without it. . . . One of us, between other jobs, built nuclear plants for a living; between other jobs, the other helped make them safer. In many respects, this is a personal topic for us both.” They acknowledge America’s strategic position as the world’s largest nuclear power generator. They argue that America needs to bring the country’s brightest minds and technologies to navigate nuclear energy research and development responsibly and ensure that is a part of a cleaner global energy system. Though the decades since the first atomic bomb was dropped have brought fear about such powerful weapons, it is perhaps to be hoped that the possibilities of nuclear energy can make the future bright.

Resources on nuclear energy, warfare, and disarmament by Hoover Fellows:

• Redefining Energy Security
• Nuclear Arms: No Time for Complacency
• Chapter 11: Redefining Energy Security 
• The Benefits of Nuclear Power
• Reinventing Nuclear Energy
• A Crack In the Ice: The Legacy of the Reykjavik Summit
• No Nukes Is Good Nukes: Nuclear Proliferation
• Chain Reactions
• Let’s Talk about Nuclear Security—Informally
• At 90, Perry Driven by Vision of a Nuclear-Free World
• Spending Less on Nuclear Weapons Could Actually Make Us Safer
• Nuclear Birthday
• Area 45: Trump’s Energy Strategy, the Nuclear Option, Featuring Jeremy Carl
• The Ultimate Defense
• War Games on the Korean Peninsula
• How North Korea Is Ensuring a Nuclear Arms Race in Asia
• The New Nuclear Arms Race
• World-Renowned Nuclear Experts Analyze Risks and Rewards of the Nuclear Enterprise in a New Book Edited by George P. Shultz and Sidney D. Drell
• We Participated in INF Negotiations. Abandoning It Threatens Our Very Existence.
• George Shultz: We Must Preserve This Nuclear Treaty
• Reinventing Nuclear Power 

Library & Archives Nuclear Collections:

• Harold M. Agnew miscellaneous papers, 1943–1994
• Edward Teller papers, 1910–2005
• Albert J. and Roberta Wohlstetter papers, 1919–2007
• Sidney D. Drell papers, 1945–2015
• Conference on the Discontinuance of Nuclear Weapon Tests proceedings, 1961
• The Nuclear Age video tape, 1988
• New Documentation Relating to “Project A” of the Manhattan Project Donated to Hoover Archives

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The Day Nuclear War Almost Broke Out

On October 27, 1962, a day that’s been described as the “most dangerous” in human history, a Soviet submarine designated B-59 was churning through the Sargasso Sea when suddenly it was rocked by a series of explosions. “It felt like you were sitting in a metal barrel, which somebody is constantly blasting with a sledgehammer,” Vadim Orlov, a communications specialist on board the sub, later recalled. “The situation was quite unusual, if not to say shocking, for the crew.”

Four weeks earlier, B-59 had been dispatched from the U.S.S.R. with three other so-called F-class subs as part of Operation Anadyr, Nikita Khrushchev’s top-secret effort to install ballistic missiles in Cuba. (The Anadyr is a river that flows into the Bering Sea; the code name was intended to make even soldiers participating in the operation believe they were headed somewhere cold.) Pretty much from the outset of the voyage, things had not gone well.

“For the sailors, this Cuban missile crisis started even before its beginning,” Ryurik Ketov, the captain of another Cuba-bound sub, once observed. The Atlantic that October was turbulent, and the pitching sea made it tough for the boats to maintain their desired speed.

“You have to hold on to something even in your sleep, or else you’ll fall off,” a crew member complained. Communications, too, were difficult. Once past Iceland, the subs had trouble contacting Moscow; for a while, according to Ketov, the only voices audible over the radio “were those of Murmansk fishermen.”

By the time President John F. Kennedy learned of Operation Anadyr, on October 16th, the subs were halfway across the Atlantic. By the time he announced the “quarantine” of Cuba, on October 22nd, they were nearing the island. They were ordered by the Soviet naval command to change course and take up positions in the Sargasso Sea. There a new set of problems arose. The subs, built for navigating farther north, had trouble operating in warm water. Temperatures inside rose to uncomfortable levels and kept on rising, to more than a hundred and ten degrees, and carbon-dioxide levels climbed, too. “It’s getting hard to breathe in here,” a crew member recorded in his diary.

By October 27th, conditions on B-59 were so bad that men were passing out; in the words of one, “They were falling like dominoes.” American destroyers were practically on top of the sub; this prevented it from surfacing to recharge its batteries and use its antenna. The boat’s captain, Valentin Savitsky, knew from previous days’ communications that a crisis was unfolding above the waves, but, unable to receive radio signals, he had no way of learning about recent developments.

To avoid escalation, American warships were supposed to follow a careful protocol when they came across subs. They were to drop harmless depth charges and instruct the subs to surface. But that day someone decided to drop hand grenades into the water. Savitsky ordered the crew to get ready to fire back.

“Maybe the war has already started up there, while we are doing somersaults here,” he shrieked. “We’re going to blast them now!”

What the grenade tossers did not know—what almost no one knew until four decades later—was that one of B-59’s torpedoes was carrying what the Soviets called “special ammunition.” The “special” part was a fifteen-kiloton nuclear warhead. Had Savitsky’s orders been carried out, chances are good that the Americans would have responded in kind, and a full-scale nuclear war would have broken out. There should, it seems, be a useful lesson to be learned from that frantic afternoon. But what, in God’s name, is it?

The story of what the Americans call the Cuban missile crisis, the Cubans call the October crisis, and the Russians call the Caribbean crisis has been told many times. The most influential account, which was also one of the earliest, was written by Robert F. Kennedy, the President’s brother and Attorney General.

R.F.K. was a member of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, or ExComm, which was swiftly assembled to advise the President during the crisis. In his memoir, eventually titled “Thirteen Days,” he plays a leading role in the deliberations—so much so that one White House aide, who read a manuscript version of the book in 1964, a few months after J.F.K.’s assassination, is said to have remarked, “I thought Jack was President during the missile crisis.” (Bobby, who was by then campaigning for the U.S. Senate, reportedly replied, “He’s not running, and I am.”)

In “ Thirteen Days ,” R.F.K. portrays himself as levelheaded and high-minded. When other members of ExComm press for a surprise attack on Cuba, he counters that such an attack could not be launched without undermining the United States’ “moral position at home and around the globe.” “Thirteen Days” was published in 1969, a year after its author’s assassination; it has never been out of print since.

In the nineteen-seventies, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, it was revealed that J.F.K. had secretly taped most of ExComm’s deliberations. He’d had a recorder installed in the basement of the West Wing that could be discreetly activated by flipping a switch under the table in the Cabinet Room. In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, the tapes were gradually declassified and released. Meanwhile, the breakup of the Soviet Union gave historians access to documents and other materials that had previously been off limits. As a result, just about everything anyone has claimed about his own conduct during the crisis has been called into question.

In “ Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis ” (Knopf), Martin J. Sherwin summarizes the “official” narrative of the “thirteen days” as follows. Members of ExComm, through “their careful consideration of the challenge, their firmness in the face of terrifying danger, and their wise counsel,” steered the world to a peaceful resolution of a potentially civilization-ending conflict. Nothing, he writes, “could be further from the truth.” The guidance J.F.K. received was, for the most part, lousy. Some of it was loony. Had he heeded ExComm’s “wise counsel,” chances are I would not be writing this, or you reading it. As the President told a friend not long after the crisis ended, “You have no idea how much bad advice I had in those days.”

As it happens, much of this bad advice came from the author of “Thirteen Days.” “Oh, shit! Shit! Shit!” the supposedly levelheaded Attorney General exclaimed when informed that the Soviets were installing missiles in Cuba. “Those sons of bitches Russians.”

At the time of the missile crisis, R.F.K. headed the awkwardly named Special Group (Augmented), which oversaw the Kennedy Administration’s covert efforts to topple Fidel Castro. Among the many schemes that had been suggested to this end were Operation Free Ride, which would have dropped plane tickets on Cuba, good for a one-way trip to Mexico City or Caracas, and Operation Bingo, which would have staged an attack on the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay in order to justify a counterattack. On Day One of the missile crisis, R.F.K. proposed his own version of Bingo. The U.S. should “sink the Maine again or something” to provide cover for invading Cuba. So much for high-mindedness.

Sherwin, a professor of history at George Mason University, is the author of two previous books on the development of atomic weapons. In his view, it’s not just the claims of those who were directly involved in the missile crisis that need to be reëvaluated; it’s also the claims of many who were not. This latter group includes President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In the lead-up to the 1960 election, the Eisenhower Administration had started to train Cuban exiles in Guatemala; the plan—supposedly top-secret—was that the exiles would return home as a guerrilla force and rally the disenchanted Cuban public to depose Castro. The plan’s cover was quickly blown. In October, 1960, a Guatemalan newspaper reported that the C.I.A. had spent a million dollars on a property that it intended to use for training exercises.

Eisenhower didn’t care for Kennedy. During the campaign, he had declared privately that he’d do “almost anything to avoid turning the country over” to him, and, to his staff, he referred to J.F.K. as “Little Boy Blue.” According to Sherwin, Eisenhower wanted Kennedy to feel compelled to carry out his no longer secret plan. At a meeting the day before J.F.K.’s Inauguration, Eisenhower told the incoming President that it was the new Administration’s “responsibility” to do “whatever is necessary” to get rid of Castro. “We cannot let the present government there go on,” Eisenhower reportedly said.

Kennedy had used Cuba against his opponent—Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s Vice-President. “If you can’t stand up to Castro, how can you be expected to stand up to Khrushchev?” he’d chided. This boxed Kennedy in; if he rejected Eisenhower’s plan, he’d be criticized on precisely the ground he’d criticized Nixon. The result, of course, was a fiasco. On April 17, 1961, the exiles landed on the beach at Bahía de Cochinos—the Bay of Pigs. It took Castro’s forces less than two days to round up or kill them all. Kennedy at first tried to deny that the U.S. had anything to do with the scheme, but that lie was quickly exposed. The director of the C.I.A., Allen Dulles, had assumed that, once the operation got under way, Kennedy would send the U.S. military to support the ill-prepared guerrillas. But the President refused to do so.

Following the debacle, some Kennedy confidants falsely claimed that they’d opposed the plan. The President was enraged by this duplicity, and there’s some speculation that this was what prompted him to install the secret taping apparatus in the West Wing. Eisenhower, for his part, insisted throughout his life that he had never passed on a “plan” to invade Cuba, a claim Sherwin likens to Bill Clinton’s, vis-à-vis Monica Lewinsky, that “there’s nothing going on between us.” (“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” Clinton later explained.)

A lesson Kennedy seems to have taken from the Bay of Pigs—in addition to the importance of keeping good records—was that even the most knowledgeable advisers can screw things up royally. After the Bay of Pigs, “he was more skeptical of the recommendations which came to him from the experts,” Ted Sorensen, one of Kennedy’s closest aides, later reported. This would serve J.F.K. well when it came time for him to deal with ExComm.

Khrushchev lit on the idea of sending missiles to Cuba almost exactly a year after the Bay of Pigs. He was convinced, correctly, that the U.S. was still intent on ousting Castro, and he wanted to prevent that from happening. Surely the Americans would think twice about attacking Cuba if they knew it was equipped with nuclear warheads. Also, just a year earlier, the U.S. had installed intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Turkey, a Soviet neighbor, so he thought that missiles in Cuba would right the balance of terror.

Before the Americans realized what was going on, Khrushchev had managed to ship forty thousand troops and more than a hundred and sixty nuclear warheads to Cuba. “American intelligence was good for nothing,” General Anatoly Gribkov, the Soviet General Staff’s chief of operations at the time, crowed years later. The tipoff finally came from spy-plane photographs.

ExComm, whose members included Vice-President Lyndon Johnson , Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, spent its first few sessions debating how best to destroy the missiles. Should there be a declaration of war? Air strikes on the sites? No one knew if any of the missiles were operational, which was obviously a major intelligence shortcoming. Should air strikes be followed by a full-scale invasion of Cuba? In that case, ninety thousand troops would have to be assembled, and it was hard to imagine how such preparations could be kept secret. McNamara warned that any form of “direct military action” would prompt a Soviet response along the same lines. But this might be “worth the price,” he opined. “Perhaps we should pay that.” R.F.K. worried that, in the days between air strikes and the deployment of ground troops, international pressure against an invasion would build. Wasn’t there some way, he asked, to get an invasion “started, so that there wasn’t any turning back?”

A few days into the crisis, Kennedy began to pull away from his advisers. It was imperative to get the missiles out of Cuba, but it was also imperative to avoid a nuclear exchange—what he termed “the final failure.” He argued in favor of blockading Cuba, rather than invading it. (The “blockade” eventually became a “quarantine,” because the former assumes a state of war.)

What prompted the shift in Kennedy’s thinking? Sherwin gives much of the credit to Adlai Stevenson, J.F.K.’s Ambassador to the U.N.—and his former opponent for the 1960 Democratic nomination—who, notably, was not a member of ExComm. Early in the deliberations, Stevenson happened to attend a lunch at the White House for the Crown Prince of Libya. After the lunch, the President pulled him aside to show him the spy photographs.

“I suppose the alternatives are to go in by air and wipe them out, or to take other steps to render the weapons inoperable,” Kennedy said.

“Let’s not go into an air strike until we have explored the possibilities of a peaceful solution,” Stevenson replied. This hardly seems a novel idea, but, Sherwin maintains, it was “the first reaction of its kind to confront Kennedy.” Stevenson subsequently sent J.F.K. a memo advocating that diplomacy be pursued before attacks, which, in Sherwin’s account, “provided Kennedy with a blueprint to do exactly that.” In an interesting twist, Sherwin presents J.F.K.’s well-known dislike of Stevenson as evidence in support of his theory. “The psychology is complicated,” he acknowledges.

Despite J.F.K.’s (and Stevenson’s) best efforts, the world came perilously close to “the final failure” on day twelve of the thirteen—a Saturday. Even as Savitsky was ordering the “special ammunition” to be loaded, the situation on land was spinning out of control. On what became known as Black Saturday, an American spy plane was shot down over Cuba, and Khrushchev received a message from Castro that seemed to urge a nuclear strike against the U.S. (Castro’s thoughts, translated into Russian, were a bit hard for the Soviet Premier to decipher.) That evening, R.F.K. was charged with making an offer to the Soviet Ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. If the Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba, the Americans would pledge not to invade the island. As an added incentive, the U.S., in the next several months, would pull its missiles from Turkey. Key to the deal, Dobrynin was told, was that the provisions about Turkey be kept secret.

In fact, they were kept so secret that most members of ExComm were unaware of them. Johnson wasn’t informed that the President had traded away American warheads, even after he became President. The lesson L.B.J. seems to have drawn from the crisis was that Kennedy had succeeded by refusing to compromise. This would have deeply unfortunate consequences when it came time for Johnson to deal with North Vietnam.

In the fall of 1962, Sherwin was a junior officer in the U.S. Navy. As the air-intelligence officer for an anti-submarine-warfare training unit based in San Diego, he was the custodian of the deployment orders that the unit was to follow in case of war. On the day that Kennedy announced the quarantine, Sherwin was instructed to retrieve the orders from his office safe and deliver them to his commanding officer. As he recalls, the orders said that, in the event of war, the unit was to deploy to an airfield in Baja California. There were jokes that Baja would be a beautiful place to die.

“I did not know until I researched this book how close to death we had come,” Sherwin writes.

Sherwin makes much of the events aboard B-59, and focusses, in particular, on the role of Vasily Arkhipov, a Soviet Navy captain who happened to be travelling on the sub. Before Arkhipov set off for Cuba, he had already been involved in a nuclear disaster, as an officer on a vessel designated K-19. This was the U.S.S.R.’s first nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered submarine. It had been rushed into service in an effort to keep up with the Americans, and it was so danger-prone that its crew began to refer to it as “Hiroshima.” In the summer of 1961, K-19 was participating in exercises off the coast of Greenland when its reactor-coolant system failed. It had no backup system. K-19’s commander sent in crew members to repair the damage, knowing they were likely to receive lethal doses of radiation. Within days, eight of the crew members who had volunteered for the task were dead.

According to various accounts, it was Arkhipov who talked Savitsky down from firing B-59’s nuclear torpedo and, potentially, starting the Third World War. Sherwin suggests that, if it weren’t for Arkhipov’s experience off Greenland, he might not have stepped in. More fundamentally, Sherwin concludes, it was a matter of chance that war was averted. Arkhipov, he observes, could have been assigned to a different sub. Or the commander of one of the other subs could have decided to launch a torpedo. Or Adlai Stevenson could have skipped lunch at the White House, or the message from Castro to Khrushchev could have been further obscured in translation, or Khrushchev could have rejected the deal that R.F.K. proposed to Dobrynin. Had countless other possible decisions been made during those thirteen days, the crisis might have been remembered very differently—had there been anyone around to remember it. As E. B. White once put it, admittedly in another context, “Things might easily have gone the other way round, and none left to do the accounting.”

“Unanticipated events can happen no matter how carefully actions are planned,” Sherwin writes. “Avoiding their terrible consequences is often as much a matter of luck as it is of careful management.” This would be a discomfiting message in the best of times. It seems especially so right now. Just two weeks after Inauguration Day, the last remaining nuclear-arms treaty between the U.S. and Russia—the so-called New START —is set to expire. The Trump Administration has already scuttled the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty—it withdrew from the accord last year—and its efforts on behalf of New START have been so halfhearted it seems likely to lapse, too. As the journal Arms Control Today noted, were this to happen there would “be no legally binding limits on the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals for the first time in nearly five decades.” In case you need another reason to lie awake at night, there’s that. ♦

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Nuclear weapons - an intolerable threat to humanity

• Nuclear weapons

The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, and most of the international community, want to ensure that nuclear weapons are never used again and are eliminated entirely. Why is it so important to act now and what can we do?

The most terrifying weapon ever invented

Nuclear weapons are the most terrifying weapon ever invented: no weapon is more destructive; no weapon causes such unspeakable human suffering; and there is no way to control how far the radioactive fallout will spread or how long the effects will last.

A nuclear bomb detonated in a city would immediately kill tens of thousands of people, and tens of thousands more would suffer horrific injuries and later die from radiation exposure.

In addition to the immense short-term loss of life, a nuclear war could cause long-term damage to our planet. It could severely disrupt the earth's ecosystem and reduce global temperatures, resulting in food shortages around the world.

Learn more:

What effects do nuclear weapons have on health, the environment and our ability to provide humanitarian assistance? And what does international humanitarian law say? Our factsheets address these important issues.

World War II. Hiroshima. People affected by gamma rays, all bald within 10 days after the explosion of the atomic bomb

Think nuclear weapons will never be used again think again..

The very existence of nuclear weapons is a threat to future generations, and indeed to the survival of humanity.

What's more, given the current regional and international tensions, the risk of nuclear weapons being used is the highest it's been since the Cold War. Nuclear-armed States are modernizing their arsenals, and their command and control systems are becoming more vulnerable to cyber attacks. There is plenty of cause for alarm about the danger we all face.

The ICRC's director-general, Yves Daccord, spoke in April last year about the heightened risk that nuclear weapons will be used and the need to abolish them, at the Nuclear Weapon Risks Symposium organized by the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR).

ICRC's Director General Yves Daccord's statement at the UNIDIR Nuclear Weapon Risks Symposium

No adequate humanitarian response

What would humanitarian organizations do in the event of a nuclear attack? The hard truth is that no State or organization could deal with the catastrophic consequences of a nuclear bomb.

The Red Cross' first-hand experience

In August 1945, in the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese Red Cross, supported by the ICRC, attempted to bring relief to the many thousands of dying and injured. The magnitude of the needs made us feel helpless and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement has been a strong advocate for a world free of nuclear weapons ever since.

Thousands of human beings in the streets and gardens in the town centre, struck by a wave of intense heat, died like flies. Others lay writhing like worms, atrociously burned. All private houses, warehouses, etc., disappeared as if swept away by a supernatural power. Trains were flung off the rails (...). Every living thing was petrified in an attitude of acute pain.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       - Dr Marcel Junod, an ICRC delegate and the first foreign doctor in Hiroshima in 1945 to assess the effects of the atomic bombing and to assist its victims.

Hiroshima after the nuclear bomb explosion in 1945

Legal response to the nuclear threat

Since these atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the ICRC has been calling for a ban on nuclear weapons to ensure that these dark events are never repeated. For decades, States have committed to preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and achieving nuclear disarmament through a number of international agreements, including the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty . Yet it was only in July 2017 that a treaty banning nuclear weapons was adopted. It was a historic and long-awaited step towards their elimination.

The world today needs the promise of this Treaty: the hope for a future without nuclear weapons. Humanity simply cannot live under the dark shadow of nuclear warfare, and the immense suffering which we all know would result.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      - ICRC President Peter Maurer, September 2017  

What can we do?

We are all responsible for making sure that decision makers understand that nuclear weapons have no place in the world we want for ourselves or for future generations. People like you are the only ones who can make a difference.

You can raise awareness of what is at stake by:

• Putting the issue of nuclear weapons on the agendas of civic, religious, social and other organizations you're part of,
• Spreading the word by sharing this page and other reliable postings on your social media platforms, and
• Writing letters to local media to share these concerns.

Depending on where you live, you can urge political leaders and those who can influence them to:

• Fulfill long-standing commitments to nuclear weapon reductions and elimination,
• Join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and
• Work urgently to reduce the growing risks that nuclear weapons will be used.

Related articles

Remembering Hiroshima: Should it ever be the future of humanity?

First Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons

Never again: Why the ICRC wants nuclear weapons eliminated and how the nuclear ban treaty can help the world get there

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How a small nuclear war would transform the entire planet

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It all starts in 2025, as tensions between India and Pakistan escalate over the contested region of Kashmir. When a terrorist attacks a site in India, that country sends tanks rolling across the border with Pakistan. As a show of force against the invading army, Pakistan decides to detonate several small nuclear bombs.

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The Role of Nuclear Weapons in International Politics: A Strategic Perspective

• Andrew L. Ross
• March 30, 2009
• National Security Program
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The Dawn of the Nuclear Age

The Nuclear Age began with the World War II Manhattan Project (1942–46), which culminated in the Trinity test on July 16, 1945, of the “Gadget” and the August 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Project was led by Gen. Leslie Groves; physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer directed the scientific research. The Trinity test took place on a test range north of Alamogordo, New Mexico. Gadget was a somewhat less than 20-kiloton implosion-type fission device. Its yield was the equivalent of the bomb load of 2000 fully loaded WWII B-29s. Reacting to the test, Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad-Gita: “I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds.”

Less than a month later, “Little Boy” was dropped on Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945. A gun-type bomb, it had an explosive force of roughly 15 kilotons. It was relatively simple: one piece of uranium-235 was fired at another. When Little Boy was exploded in an airburst about 1900 feet over Hiroshima, some 80,000-140,000 people were killed instantly; another 100,000 were seriously injured. The burst’s temperature was estimated to reach more than 1 million degrees Celsius. The surrounding air was ignited, resulting in an 840-foot fireball; in less than a second, it expanded to over 900 feet. The blast wave from the explosion shattered windows ten miles away and was felt 37 miles away. Over two-thirds of the buildings in Hiroshima were demolished. Virtually everything within about 4.4 miles of ground zero of the explosion was incinerated by the hundreds of fires ignited by the thermal pulse. About thirty minutes later, a heavy “black rain” infused with dirt, dust, soot, and radioactive particles began falling in areas of the city. All this was the result of a relatively small device by today’s standards.

A few days later, on August 9, “Fat Man,” a roughly 21 kiloton bomb, was exploded over Nagasaki. According to Japanese estimates, almost 24,000 people were killed and another 23,000 wounded; the lower casualty rates despite the bomb’s being larger had to do with the terrain—Nagasaki was much hillier than Hiroshima. More than 40 percent of the city was destroyed. Fat Man was an implosion-type fission weapon, a more complex plutonium bomb. Unlike Little Boy, this type of bomb had been tested—the Little Boy type had not been. This was not just continuing wartime activities using a new device, it was also a test.

On August 15, after these two uses of the bomb (and the Soviet entry into the war against Japan), Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender.

The Nuclear Revolution in Military Affairs

The Nuclear Revolution is both a revolution in military affairs (RMA) and more than an “ordinary” RMA. From the start, nuclear weapons were regarded as so qualitatively different that everything that came before was rendered “conventional.” The most powerful bombs used in WWII until August 1945 contained 10 tons of TNT; the average yield of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was the equivalent of 18,000 tons of TNT. The first U.S. thermonuclear test, in November 1952, had a yield of over 10 megatons, almost 580 times the power of the nuclear devices exploded in August 1945. Today, one intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) warhead possesses the equivalent of the explosive power used in all of WWII.

A RMA has three components: technology, doctrine, and organization. The nuclear revolution was a technology-driven RMA. It was not the result of existing strategy. Certainly, the United States wanted to develop nuclear weapons before Germany did. But U.S. leaders didn’t have a specific use in mind—that came later. The Manhattan Project was viewed as a technological race with the Germans. That prefigured what was to come with the subsequent U.S.-Soviet technological competition. New doctrine and strategy was developed. The United States had to determine what role nuclear weapons were to play. Initially, the U.S. Army-Air Force (then the USAF after 1947) took the lead; relatively soon, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy went nuclear. New military organizations emerged—the Strategic Air Command, for instance. New service elites—strategic bomber pilots and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) operators in the USAF and nuclear submariners in the USN—appeared. New civilian structures were stood up, including the Atomic Energy Commission, which over time became the Department of Energy; subsequently, we saw the establishment of National Nuclear Security Administration.

There were further technological developments. Not only did we go from fission to fusion by 1952, but we also devised new delivery systems, truly intercontinental jet bombers developed relatively quickly during the 1950s, with the B-52 (which is still with us) making its appearance in the mid-1950s. In between going from bombers to ICBMs, the USAF worked on cruise missiles. The latter weren’t particularly successful in the 1950s but reappeared in the 1970s and 1980s. The Navy developed submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) that were put on new platforms, nuclear-powered submarines.

The nuclear revolution is an RMA with a difference that made a difference. There were other RMAs in the 20th century, such as the German blitzkrieg that emerged during the interwar period. Like earlier RMAs, the blitzkrieg was developed during peacetime and was tested and employed during wartime. The nuclear revolution emerged during a conflict, and nuclear weapons have not been used in war since August 1945. Their impact has greater off than on the battlefield. They have not been used against a nuclear foe. Fortunately, the world has not experienced “nuclear combat” on a “nuclear battlefield,” much less a nuclear war. There have been many tests—and we think we know a lot about the effects of nuclear explosions as a result of all those tests—but there has never been anything that resembles nuclear combat, a nuclear battlefield, or a nuclear war.

The nuclear revolution had greater strategic than operational or tactical war-fighting implications. It has been about deterrence and how we think about deterrence rather than war-fighting. Deterrence became nuclear weapons’ central role. Some, such as Bernard Brodie in 1946, recognized that very early on. Over time, a very high level of strategic interdependence developed among the states that possessed nuclear weapons, at least among those that possessed large quantities of them—the U.S. and USSR were very sensitive to each other’s nuclear moves. Some argue that nuclear weapons are responsible for what historian John Lewis Gaddis called the “long peace” of the Cold War. We have not seen a major power war since August 1945. Gaddis and other analysts argue that this is a direct result of the nuclear revolution. So we have seen a revolution in  strategic , not merely military, affairs.

Another difference is that this RMA was led by civilians rather than the military. From the Manhattan Project on, civilians—Americans, Canadians, British, former Germans—led this RMA. More important, those who were responsible for the systematic exploration and development of U.S. nuclear policy and strategy over the years have been primarily civilians, people like Bernard Brodie, a historian/political scientist at RAND and then UCLA; the mathematician Albert Wohlstetter, also at RAND; the Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling, who was at Harvard and then the University of Maryland; and RAND’s Herman Kahn, who wrote  Thinking About the Unthinkable  (1962). These and other civilians were the pioneers— Fred Kaplan called them the “Wizards of Armageddon”—in developing nuclear thought. In the past, new strategy and doctrine were developed by the military.

The Central Role of Deterrence

In 1946, Bernard Brodie, one of the Wizards of Armageddon, observed “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other purpose.” Brodie here put deterrence front and center. Also in 1946, General H. A. P. Arnold provided a hint of how to think about deterrence: “[O]ur first line of defense is the ability to retaliate even after receiving the hardest blow the military can deliver.” This is about striking second, about being able to absorb a nuclear blow, having forces that would survive, and being able to retaliate and punish the enemy.

The objective of deterrence is to prevent aggression and war, not necessarily to be able to fight a war. In the past, we’ve often thought that the ability to deter depended on the ability to fight: to be able to defend yourself and to be able to go on the offense. Whether that logic applies to nuclear deterrence has been a matter of no little contention.

The United States has attempted to deter threats against itself and against its allies and friends. Deterrence of threats against the U.S. homeland has been referred to as core, central, or fundamental deterrence. The deterrence of threats against allies and friends is known as extended deterrence. When we’ve talked about countries like South Korea or Japan being under the U.S. nuclear umbrella or about preventing Soviet aggression against our NATO allies, we were talking about extended deterrence.

Deterrence entails persuading potential aggressors that the costs and risks of aggression are sure to exceed its benefits. This requires the requisite capabilities and the willingness to use them. Extended deterrence is regarded as more difficult than core or central deterrence: would the United States really risk the destruction of New York or San Francisco to save Bonn or Paris? It is generally thought that the target of deterrence has to be a rational actor. A very limited definition of rationality is at play here. It doesn’t mean than an adversary has to think like us; it simply has to recognize that the costs and risks of aggression will exceed the benefits. If you do A, we’ll do B, which could well be the destruction of your society as you know it.

It’s usually clear when deterrence has failed. If the Soviets had invaded Western Europe during the Cold War, deterrence would have failed. Some argue that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was a deterrence failure. It’s very difficult, however, to know for certain when deterrence is working. Does the fact that the USSR never invaded Western Europe mean that U.S. extended deterrence worked? That something we wanted to prevent, or deter, didn’t happen doesn’t necessarily mean that what we did worked. Conclusively demonstrating why something did not occur is always problematical.

During the Cold War, two ways were developed of persuading a potential adversary that the costs and risks of aggression would be greater than the benefits. The first approach emphasized the threat of punishment; aggression would be met with the infliction of unacceptable costs; an aggressor would pay an unacceptably high price. The second approach emphasized the denial of objectives: aggression would fail; an aggressor would be stopped and defeated. Although these two approaches were developed in the context of the dyadic, U.S.-Soviet Cold War relationship, they continue to frame the post-Cold War nuclear policy and strategy debate.

What kind of nuclear capabilities are required to punish an aggressor, to impose unacceptable costs on an aggressor? Punishment is thought to require not only offensive strike capabilities, but also retaliatory, second- (rather than first-) strike capabilities. The emphasis on second-strike capabilities requires survivable forces. Survivability is enhanced by dispersing forces, rather than concentrating them, by deploying them underground in concrete, steel-reinforced silos; or by putting them out at sea in submarines that cannot be easily tracked and targeted. Redundancy, in the form of the triad of bombers, ICBMs, and SLBMs, also enhances force survivability. Punishment embraces the defense of military systems, whether passive (dispersal, hardening) or active (point defense). It requires as well the ability to destroy urban/industrial or “countervalue” targets, a targeting capability that does not require an especially high degree of accuracy.

The threat of punishment does not require civil defense capabilities or national ballistic missile defense capabilities that would serve to erode an opponent’s ability to punish you (population centers were to remain vulnerable—Reagan’s SDI was seen as providing an offensive rather than a defensive capability). Punishment requires relatively low cost, finite, or absolute, capabilities. It provides an answer to “how much is enough?” Punishment came to be known as “Assured Destruction” or, when both sides subscribe to it, “Mutual Assured Destruction”—MAD. Advocates of this approach viewed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 as the enshrinement of punishment, assured destruction, and MAD. In their view, by embracing the ABM Treaty, both the U.S. and the USSR agreed not to take their population centers out of hostage.

What kind of nuclear capabilities are required to deny an aggressor the accomplishment of objectives? Denial requires all the capabilities needed for punishment and more. It emphasizes the need for a full range of offensive and defensive capabilities. Denial requires offensive strike capabilities, not just to retaliate but to strike first. Some argue that extended deterrence necessitates a first-strike capability. Like punishment, denial requires survivability and redundancy. Needed too are robust, survivable C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) capabilities. Unlike punishment, denial places a premium on the ability to destroy not just countervalue but military, “counterforce,” targets, especially the other side’s nuclear capabilities, such as its ICBMs and command and control centers. Counterforce targeting is much more demanding than countervalue targeting; hardened, underground target and mobile targets must be put at risk. A much higher degree of accuracy, therefore, is required. Denial demands passive and active defensive capabilities to protect not only military capabilities but population centers. It requires civil defense (air raid shelters) and national anti-ballistic missile defense capabilities as well as point defense, hardening, concealment, dispersal, and mobility.

Denial, clearly, requires a full suite of nuclear war-fighting capabilities. It emphasizes relative rather than absolute capabilities—superiority matters. Since one can never have too much superiority, denial is essentially open ended. Thus a denial posture is a great deal more expensive than a punishment posture. Kennedy and McNamara came into office convinced that the Eisenhower approach, which emphasized massive retaliation, provided too few options—it appeared to be all or nothing. They initially embraced a move to a denial, or “Flexible Response,” posture. Once McNamara realized how open ended this was, he moved to an assured destruction posture. With their emphasis on the need for not just a deterrent but a nuclear war-fighting capability, the proponents of Flexible Response became known as NUTs—nuclear utility theorists.

The positions of the two schools can be compared as follows:

We see differences in objectives here. For Assured Destruction, it’s all about the ability to deter and retaliate, to punish, to harm. Flexible Response is about the ability to deter, fight, and win a nuclear war. This is much more demanding. Flexible Response has a fallback; Assured Destruction does not. Does having a fallback make it more likely that deterrence will fail? Assured destruction answers “Yes”—and that this is an experiment we should not want to run. Does a nuclear war-fighting capability enhance or erode deterrence? According to Assured Destruction, it erodes deterrence; according to Flexible Response, it enhances deterrence.

Have we been MAD or NUTS? Both, actually. We’ve gone back and forth. At times we’ve been a combination of the two, even though the two are in tension with one another. In the 1950s, the declaratory policy of massive retaliation amounted, essentially, to an early version of Assured Destruction. Many argue that it was credible in the 1950s because the U.S. had nuclear superiority, and Assured Destruction wasn’t mutual. As noted, Kennedy and McNamara initially shifted away from Assured Destruction to Flexible Response, saw how demanding and expensive it was, and moved back to Assured Destruction. It became MAD in the late 1960s-early 1970s. Nixon and Kissinger placed a declaratory emphasis on “essential equivalence,” i.e., MAD. That’s when the ABM Treaty was negotiated and signed. After James Schlesinger came in as secretary of defense, we moved away from Assured Destruction to Flexible Response and emphasized the development of limited nuclear options, especially counterforce options. Under Carter and Reagan we moved further away from Assured Destruction to Flexible Response.

Over the years, we’ve been MAD and NUTs. What should we be now? What specifically are we trying to deter with nuclear weapons?

• State use of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction?
• State use of conventional weapons? Do we still need to use nuclear weapons to deter other states’ use of conventional weapons?
• Non-state actor use of nuclear or other WMD? (Can terrorists be deterred the way states are deterred?)
• State support for non-state actor use of nuclear or other WMD?
• Non-state actor use of “conventional” weapons?
• State support for non-state actor use of “conventional” weapons?

Today most advocates of Assured Destruction, or a minimalist approach, argue that the only role for nuclear weapons is the deterrence of the use of nuclear weapons. The proponents of a Flexible Response, or a maximalist approach, continue to see a broader role for nuclear weapons.

Non-deterrent Roles

Nuclear weapons have had a truncated war-fighting role. They were only used in August 1945; most of us think that’s a good thing. A tradition of nonuse, which some think is sufficiently strong as to constitute a nuclear taboo, has developed over the years.

For some, nuclear weapons clearly are a status symbol, an indicator or attribute of major power status. The U.S. development of nuclear weapons was replicated by the USSR (1949), Britain (1952), France (1960), China (1964), Israel (1966/67), India (1974, 1998) and Pakistan (1998), and the DPRK (2006). Now we’re concerned about Iran going nuclear. Is it a coincidence that the first five nuclear powers were the five permanent members of the UN Security Council? Of course they’re also the only nuclear weapons states recognized by the Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968.

In addition to their role as status symbols, nuclear weapons have served as an equalizer. During the Cold War, nuclear weapons were relied upon by the United States and its NATO allies to counter, or offset, the conventional advantage of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. This was what, for instance, the Eisenhower administration’s New Look was all about.

Today, the tables have been turned. It’s the U.S. that possesses an enormous conventional advantage; Russia, which in conventional military terms is a mere rump state of the former Soviet Union, relies on its nuclear capabilities to the extent that it’s concerned about the need to counter U.S. and NATO conventional capabilities. Others, state and non-state alike, seek a nuclear counter to U.S. conventional superiority. There are a number of reasons states seek to go nuclear. But to the extent that is U.S. military capabilities that spur them to do so, it is not U.S. nuclear capabilities but U.S. conventional capabilities, particularly the manner in which they have been used since 9/11, that is most prominently at play.

Nuclear weapons have thus served as a substitute for conventional forces. In the past, the U.S. and NATO quite explicitly substituted nuclear for conventional weapons. Today, Russia is doing that; like the United States and NATO in the past, Russia more recently hasn’t been able to afford, or hasn’t wanted to pay for, the conventional capabilities required to match those of an erstwhile adversary. Again as in the past, nuclear weapons continue to play a role in dampening defense spending.

Finally, nuclear weapons arguably have played a role in discouraging both horizontal and vertical proliferation. Extended deterrence has provided an excuse for European states such as Germany and Asian states such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan for not going nuclear. It has been suggested as well that the sheer size of the U.S. (and Soviet or Russian) nuclear arsenals have dissuaded others from attempting to increase their nuclear capabilities or even joining the nuclear club since competing seriously with the likes of the United States is hopeless. For some (although not this author), this dissuasion effect is cause for not reducing the U.S. nuclear arsenal below the Moscow Treaty range of 1,700-2,200 warheads.

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Nowhere to hide

How a nuclear war would kill you — and almost everyone else.

Simulation of soot injected into the atmosphere after a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. (Courtesy Max Tegmark / Future of Life Institute )

October 20, 2022

By François Diaz-Maurin

Design by Thomas Gaulkin

This summer, the New York City Emergency Management department released a new public service announcement on nuclear preparedness, instructing New Yorkers about what to do during a nuclear attack. The 90-second video starts with a woman nonchalantly announcing the catastrophic news: “So there’s been a nuclear attack. Don’t ask me how or why, just know that the big one has hit.” Then the PSA video advises New Yorkers on what to do in case of a nuclear attack: Get inside, stay inside, and stay tuned to media and governmental updates.

But nuclear preparedness works better if you are not in the blast radius of a nuclear attack. Otherwise, there’s no going into your house and closing your doors because the house will be gone . Now imagine there have been hundreds of those “big ones.” That’s what even a “small” nuclear war would include. If you are lucky not to be within the blast radius of one of those, it may not ruin your day, but soon enough, it will ruin your whole life.

Effects of a single nuclear explosion

Any nuclear explosion creates radiation, heat, and blast effects that will result in many quick fatalities.

Direct radiation is the most immediate effect of the detonation of a nuclear weapon. It is produced by the nuclear reactions inside the bomb and comes mainly in the form of gamma rays and neutrons.

Direct radiation lasts less than a second, but its lethal level can extend over a mile in all directions from the detonation point of a modern-day nuclear weapon with an explosive yield equal to the effect of several hundred kilotons of TNT.

Photos from the first second of the Trinity test shot, the first nuclear explosion on Earth. (Los Alamos National Laboratory)

Microseconds into the explosion of a nuclear weapon, energy released in the form of X-rays heats the surrounding environment, forming a fireball of superheated air. Inside the fireball, the temperature and pressure are so extreme that all matter is rendered into a hot plasma of bare nuclei and subatomic particles, as is the case in the Sun’s multi-million-degree core.

The fireball following the airburst explosion of a 300-kiloton nuclear weapon—like the W87 thermonuclear warhead deployed on the Minuteman III missiles currently in service in the US nuclear arsenal—can grow to more than 600 meters (2,000 feet) in diameter and stays blindingly luminous for several seconds, before its surface cools.

The light radiated by the fireball’s heat—accounting for more than one-third of the thermonuclear weapon’s explosive energy—will be so intense that it ignites fires and causes severe burns at great distances. The thermal flash from a 300-kiloton nuclear weapon could cause first-degree burns as far as 13 kilometers (8 miles) from ground zero.

Then comes the blast wave.

The blast wave—which accounts for about half the bomb’s explosive energy—travels initially faster than the speed of sound but slows rapidly as it loses energy by passing through the atmosphere.

Because the radiation superheats the atmosphere around the fireball, air in the surroundings expands and is pushed rapidly outward, creating a shockwave that pushes against anything along its path and has great destructive power.

The destructive power of the blast wave depends on the weapon’s explosive yield and the burst altitude.

Film footage from the Apple 2 / Cue nuclear test shot on May 5, 1955, part of the Operation Teapot series.

An airburst of a 300-kiloton explosion would produce a blast with an overpressure of over 5 pounds per square inch (or 0.3 atmospheres) up to 4.7 kilometers (2.9 miles) from the target. This is enough pressure to destroy most houses, gut skyscrapers, and cause widespread fatalities less than 10 seconds after the explosion.

Radioactive fallout

Shortly after the nuclear detonation has released most of its energy in the direct radiation, heat, and blast, the fireball begins to cool and rise, becoming the head of the familiar mushroom cloud. Within it is a highly-radioactive brew of split atoms, which will eventually begin to drop out of the cloud as it is blown by the wind. Radioactive fallout, a form of delayed radioactivity, will expose post-war survivors to near-lethal doses of ionizing radiation.

As for the blast, the severity of the fallout contamination depends on the fission yield of the bomb and its height of burst. For weapons in the hundreds of kilotons, the area of immediate danger can encompass thousands of square kilometers downwind of the detonation site. Radiation levels will be initially dominated by isotopes of short half-lives, which are the most energetic and so most dangerous to biological systems. The acutely lethal effects from the fallout will last from days to weeks, which is why authorities recommend staying inside for at least 48 hours, to allow radiation levels to decrease.

Because its effects are relatively delayed, estimating casualties from the fallout is difficult; the number of deaths and injuries will depend very much on what actions people take after an explosion. But in the vicinity of an explosion, buildings will be completely collapsed, and survivors will not be able to shelter. Survivors finding themselves less than 460 meters (1,500 feet) from a 300-kiloton nuclear explosion will receive an ionizing radiation dose of 500 Roentgen equivalent man (rem). “It is generally believed that humans exposed to about 500 rem of radiation all at once will likely die without medical treatment,” the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission says .

But at a distance so close to ground zero, a 300-kiloton nuclear explosion would almost certainly burn and crush to death any human being. The higher the nuclear weapon’s yield, the smaller the acute radiation zone is relative to its other immediate effects.

One detonation of a modern-day, 300-kiloton nuclear warhead—that is, a warhead nearly 10 times the power of the atomic bombs detonated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined—on a city like New York would lead to over one million people dead and about twice as many people with serious injuries in the first 24 hours after the explosion. There would be almost no survivors within a radius of several kilometers from the explosion site.

deaths after 24 hours

Immediate effects of nuclear war

Excerpt from “ Plan A ” a video simulation of an escalatory nuclear war between the United States and Russia. (Alex Glaser / Program on Science and Global Security, Princeton University)

In a nuclear war, hundreds or thousands of detonations would occur within minutes of each other.

Regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan that involved about 100 15-kiloton nuclear weapons launched at urban areas would result in 27 million direct deaths .

deaths from regional war

A global all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia with over four thousand 100-kiloton nuclear warheads would lead, at minimum, to 360 million quick deaths .*  That’s about 30 million people more than the entire US population.

360,000,000

deaths from global war

*  This estimate is based on a scenario of an all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States involving 4,400 100-kiloton weapons under the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) limits, where each country can deploy up to 2,200 strategic warheads. The 2010 New START Treaty further limits the US- and Russian-deployed long-range nuclear forces down to 1,550 warheads. But as the average yield of today’s strategic nuclear forces of Russia and the United States far exceeds 100 kilotons, a full nuclear exchange between the two countries involving around 3,000 weapons likely would result in similar direct casualties and soot emissions.

In an all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States, the two countries would not limit to shooting nuclear missiles at each other’s homeland but would target some of their weapons at other countries, including ones with nuclear weapons. These countries could launch some or all their weapons in retaliation.

Together, the United Kingdom, China, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea currently have an estimated total of over 1,200 nuclear warheads .

As horrific as those statistics are, the tens to hundreds of millions of people dead and injured within the first few days of a nuclear conflict would only be the beginnings of a catastrophe that eventually will encompass the whole world.

Global climatic changes, widespread radioactive contamination, and societal collapse virtually everywhere could be the reality that survivors of a nuclear war would contend with for many decades.

Two years after any nuclear war—small or large—famine alone could be more than 10 times as deadly as the hundreds of bomb blasts involved in the war itself.

The longer-term consequences of nuclear war

The only color photograph of the Trinity nuclear test on July 16, 1945. (Jack Aeby / Los Alamos National Laboratory)

In recent years, in some US military and policy circles, there has been a growing perception that a limited nuclear war can be fought and won. Many experts believe, however, that a limited nuclear war is unlikely to remain limited. What starts with one tactical nuclear strike or a tit-for-tat nuclear exchange between two countries could escalate to an all-out nuclear war ending with the immediate and utter destruction of both countries.

But the catastrophe will not be limited to those two belligerents and their allies.

The long-term regional and global effects of nuclear explosions have been overshadowed in public discussions by the horrific, obvious, local consequences of nuclear explosions. Military planners have also focused on the short-term effects of nuclear explosions because they are tasked with estimating the capabilities of nuclear forces on civilian and military targets. Blast, local radiation fallout, and electromagnetic pulse (an intense burst of radio waves that can damage electronic equipment) are all desired outcomes of the use of nuclear weapons—from a military perspective.

But widespread fires and other global climatic changes resulting from many nuclear explosions may not be accounted for in war plans and nuclear doctrines. These collateral effects are difficult to predict; assessing them requires scientific knowledge that most military planners don’t possess or take into account. Yet, in the few years following a nuclear war, such collateral damage may be responsible for the death of more than half of the human population on Earth.

Global climatic changes

Since the 1980s, as the threat of nuclear war reached new heights, scientists have investigated the long-term, widespread effects of nuclear war on Earth systems. Using a radiative-convective climate model that simulates the vertical profile of atmospheric temperatures, American scientists first showed that a nuclear winter could occur from the smoke produced by the massive forest fires ignited by nuclear weapons after a nuclear war. Two Russian scientists later conducted the first three-dimensional climate modeling showing that global temperatures would drop lower on land than on oceans, potentially causing an agricultural collapse worldwide. Initially contested for its imprecise results due to uncertainties in the scenarios and physical parameters involved, nuclear winter theory is now supported by more sophisticated climate models . While the basic mechanisms of nuclear winter described in the early studies still hold today, most recent calculations have shown that the effects of nuclear war would be more long-lasting and worse than previously thought.

A huge cloud resulting from the massive fires caused by “Little Boy”—the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945—a few hours after the initial explosion. (US Army)

Stratospheric soot injection

The heat and blast from a thermonuclear explosion are so powerful they can initiate large-scale fires in both urban and rural settings. A 300-kiloton detonation in a city like New York or Washington DC could cause a mass fire with a radius of at least 5.6 kilometers (3.5 miles), not altered by any weather conditions. Air in that area would be turned into dust, fire, and smoke.

But a nuclear war will set not just one city on fire , but hundreds of them, all but simultaneously. Even a regional nuclear war—say between India and Pakistan—could lead to widespread firestorms in cities and industrial areas that would have the potential to cause global climatic change , disrupting every form of life on Earth for decades.

Smoke from mass fires after a nuclear war could inject massive amounts of soot into the stratosphere, the Earth’s upper atmosphere. An all-out nuclear war between India and Pakistan, with both countries launching a total of 100 nuclear warheads of an average yield of 15 kilotons, could produce a stratospheric loading of some 5 million tons (or teragrams, Tg) of soot. This is about the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza, pulverized and turned into superheated dust.

A simulation of the vertically averaged smoke optical depth in the first 54 days after a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. ( Robock et al., Atmos. Chem. Phys., 7, 2003–2012, 2007 )

But these lower-end estimates date back to the late 2000s. Since then, India and Pakistan have significantly expanded their nuclear arsenals, both in the number of nuclear warheads and yield. By 2025, India and Pakistan could have up to 250 nuclear weapons each, with yields of 12 kilotons on the low end, up to a few hundred kilotons. A nuclear war between India and Pakistan with such arsenals could send up to 47 Tg of soot into the stratosphere.

For comparison, the recent catastrophic forest fires in Canada in 2017 and Australia in 2019 and 2020 produced 0.3 Tg and 1 Tg of smoke respectively. Chemical analysis showed, however, that only a small percentage of the smoke from these fires was pure soot—0.006 and 0.02 Tg respectively. This is because only wood was burning. Urban fires following a nuclear war would produce more smoke, and a higher fraction would be soot. But these two episodes of massive forest fires demonstrated that when smoke is injected into the lower stratosphere, it is heated by sunlight and lofted at high altitudes—10 to 20 kilometers (33,000 to 66,000 feet)—prolonging the time it stays in the stratosphere. This is precisely the mechanism that now allows scientists to better simulate the long-term impacts of nuclear war. With their models, researchers were able to accurately simulate the smoke from these large forest fires, further supporting the mechanisms that cause nuclear winter.

The climatic response from volcanic eruptions also continues to serve as a basis for understanding the long-term impacts of nuclear war. Volcanic blasts typically send ash and dust up into the stratosphere where it reflects sunlight back into space, resulting in the temporary cooling of the Earth’s surface. Likewise , in the theory of nuclear winter, the climatic effects of a massive injection of soot aerosols into the stratosphere from fires following a nuclear war would lead to the heating of the stratosphere, ozone depletion, and cooling at the surface under this cloud. Volcanic eruptions are also useful because their magnitude can match—or even surpass—the level of nuclear explosions. For instance, the 2022 Hunga Tonga’s underwater volcano released an explosive energy of 61 megatons of TNT equivalent —more than the Tsar Bomba, the largest human-made explosion in history with 50 Mt. Its plume reached altitudes up to about 56 kilometers (35 miles), injecting well over 50 Tg —even up to 146 Tg —of water vapor into the stratosphere where it will stay for years. Such a massive injection of stratospheric water could temporarily impact the climate—although differently than soot.

Aerial footage of the 2022 Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption. The vapor plume reached altitudes up to 56 kilometers (35 miles) and injected more than 50 teragrams of water vapor into the stratosphere. (Tonga Geological Services via YouTube )

Since Russia’s war in Ukraine started, President Putin and other Russian officials have made repeated nuclear threats , in an apparent attempt to deter Western countries from any direct military intervention. If Russia were to ever start—voluntarily or accidentally—nuclear war with the United States and other NATO countries, the number of devastating nuclear explosions involved in a full exchange could waft more than 150 Tg of soot into the stratosphere, leading to a nuclear winter that would disrupt virtually all forms of life on Earth over several decades.

Stratospheric soot injections associated with different nuclear war scenarios would lead to a wide variety of major climatic and biogeochemical changes, including transformations of the atmosphere, oceans, and land. Such global climate changes will be more long-lasting than previously thought because models of the 1980s did not adequately represent the stratospheric plume rise. It is now understood that soot from nuclear firestorms would rise much higher into the stratosphere than once imagined, where soot removal mechanisms in the form of “black rains” are slow. Once the smoke is heated by sunlight it can self-loft to altitudes as high as 80 kilometers (50 miles), penetrating the mesosphere.

A simulation of the vertically averaged smoke optical depth in the first 54 days after a nuclear war between Russia and the United States. (Alan Robock)

Changes in the atmosphere

After soot is injected into the upper atmosphere, it can stay there for months to years, blocking some direct sunlight from reaching the Earth’s surface and decreasing temperatures. At high altitudes—20 kilometers (12 miles) and above near the equator and 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) at the poles—the smoke injected by nuclear firestorms would also absorb more radiation from the sun, heating the stratosphere and perturbing stratospheric circulation.

In the stratosphere, the presence of highly absorptive black carbon aerosols would result in considerably enhanced stratospheric temperatures. For instance, in a regional nuclear war scenario that leads to a 5-Tg injection of soot, stratospheric temperatures would remain elevated by 30 degrees Celsius after four years.

The extreme heating observed in the stratosphere would increase the global average loss of the ozone layer—which protects humans and other life on Earth from the severe health and environmental effects of ultraviolet radiation—for the first few years after a nuclear war. Simulations have shown that a regional nuclear war that lasted three days and injected 5 Tg of soot into the stratosphere would reduce the ozone layer by 25 percent globally; recovery would take 12 years. A global nuclear war injecting 150 Tg of stratospheric smoke would cause a 75 percent global ozone loss, with the depletion lasting 15 years.

Changes on land

Soot injection in the stratosphere will lead to changes on the Earth’s surface, including the amount of solar radiation that is received, air temperature, and precipitation.

The loss of the Earth’s protective ozone layer would result in several years of extremely high ultraviolet (UV) light at the surface, a hazard to human health and food production. Most recent estimates indicate that the ozone loss after a global nuclear war would lead to a tropical UV index above 35, starting three years after the war and lasting for four years. The US Environmental Protection Agency considers a UV index of 11 to pose an “extreme” danger; 15 minutes of exposure to a UV index of 12 causes unprotected human skin to experience sunburn. Globally, the average sunlight in the UV-B range would increase by 20 percent. High levels of UV-B radiation are known to cause sunburn, photoaging, skin cancer, and cataracts in humans. They also inhibit the photolysis reaction required for leaf expansion and plant growth.

Smoke lofted into the stratosphere would reduce the amount of solar radiation making it to Earth’s surface, reducing global surface temperatures and precipitation dramatically.

Even a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan—causing a relatively modest stratospheric loading of 5 Tg of soot—could produce the lowest temperatures on Earth in the past 1,000 years—temperatures below the post-medieval Little Ice Age. A regional nuclear war with 5-Tg stratospheric soot injection would have the potential to make global average temperatures drop by 1 degree Celsius.

Even though their nuclear arsenals have been cut in size and average yield since the end of the Cold War, a nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia would still likely initiate a much more severe nuclear winter, with much of the northern hemisphere facing below-freezing temperatures even during the summer. A global nuclear war that injected 150 Tg of soot into the stratosphere could make temperatures drop by 8 degrees Celsius—3 degrees lower than Ice Age values.

In any nuclear war scenario, the temperature changes would have their greatest effect on mid- and high-latitude agriculture, by reducing the length of the crop season and the temperature even during that season. Below-freezing temperatures could also lead to a significant expansion of sea ice and terrestrial snowpack, causing food shortages and affecting shipping to crucial ports where sea ice is not now a factor.

Global average precipitation after a nuclear war would also drop significantly because the lower amounts of solar radiation reaching the surface would reduce temperatures and water evaporation rates. The precipitation decrease would be the greatest in the tropics . For instance, even a 5-Tg soot injection would lead to a 40 percent precipitation decrease in the Asian monsoon region. South America and Africa would also experience large drops in rainfall.

Changes in the ocean

The longest-lasting consequences of any nuclear war would involve oceans . Regardless of the location and magnitude of a nuclear war, the smoke from the resulting firestorms would quickly reach the stratosphere and be dispersed globally, where it would absorb sunlight and reduce the solar radiation to the ocean surface. The ocean surface would respond more slowly to changes in radiation than the atmosphere and land due to its higher specific heat capacity (i.e., the quantity of heat needed to raise the temperature per unit of mass).

Global ocean temperature decrease will be the greatest starting three to four years after a nuclear war, dropping by approximately 3.5 degrees Celsius for an India-Pakistan war (that injected 47 Tg of smoke into the stratosphere) and six degrees Celsius for a global US-Russia war (150 Tg). Once cooled, the ocean will take even more time to return to its pre-war temperatures, even after the soot has disappeared from the stratosphere and solar radiation returns to normal levels. The delay and duration of the changes will increase linearly with depth. Abnormally low temperatures are likely to persist for decades near the surface, and hundreds of years or longer at depth. For a global nuclear war (150 Tg), changes in ocean temperature to the Arctic sea-ice are likely to last thousands of years—so long that researchers talk of a “nuclear Little Ice Age.”

Because of the dropping solar radiation and temperature on the ocean surface, marine ecosystems would be highly disrupted both by the initial perturbation and by the new, long-lasting ocean state. This will result in global impacts on ecosystem services, such as fisheries. For instance, the marine net primary production (a measure of the new growth of marine algae, which makes up the base of the marine food web) would decline sharply after any nuclear war. In a US-Russia scenario (150 Tg), the global marine net primary production would be cut almost by half in the months after the war and would remain reduced by 20 to 40 percent for over 4 years, with the largest decreases being in the North Atlantic and North Pacific oceans.

Impacts on food production

Changes in the atmosphere, surface, and oceans following a nuclear war will have massive and long-term consequences on global agricultural production and food availability. Agriculture responds to the length of growing seasons, the temperature during the growing season, light levels, precipitation, and other factors. A nuclear war will significantly alter all of those factors, on a global scale for years to decades.

Using new climate, crop, and fishery models, researchers have now demonstrated that soot injections larger than 5 Tg would lead to mass food shortages in almost all countries, although some will be at greater risk of famine than others. Globally, livestock production and fishing would be unable to compensate for reduced crop output. After a nuclear war, and after stored food is consumed, the total food calories available in each nation will drop dramatically, putting millions at risk of starvation or undernourishment. Mitigation measures—shifts in production and consumption of livestock food and crops, for example—would not be sufficient to compensate for the global loss of available calories.

The aforementioned food production impacts do not account for the long-term direct impacts of radioactivity on humans or the widespread radioactive contamination of food that could follow a nuclear war. International trade of food products could be greatly reduced or halted as countries hoard domestic supplies. But even assuming a heroic action of altruism by countries whose food systems are less affected, trade could be disrupted by another effect of the war: sea ice.

Cooling of the ocean’s surface would lead to an expansion of sea ice in the first years after a nuclear war, when food shortages would be highest. This expansion would affect shipping into crucial ports in regions where sea ice is not currently experienced, such as the Yellow Sea.

Post-nuclear famine

Number of people and percentage of the population who could die from starvation two years after a nuclear war. Regional nuclear war scenario corresponds to 5Tg of soot produced by 100 15-kiloton nuclear weapons launched between India and Pakistan. Large-scale nuclear war scenario corresponds to 150Tg of soot produced by 4,400 100-kiloton nuclear weapons launched between Russia and the United States. (Source: Xia et al.  Nature Food  3, no. 8 (2022): 586-596 .)

Regional war

The impacts of nuclear war on agricultural food systems would have dire consequences for most humans who survive the war and its immediate effects.

The overall global consequences of nuclear war—including both short-term and long-term impacts—would be even more horrific causing hundreds of millions—even billions—of people to starve to death.

If this ↑ red line represents an estimate of deaths from one 300-kiloton nuclear bomb detonated over New York City ...

... then these ↑ are the direct deaths from an India-Pakistan nuclear war with an exchange of one hundred 15-kiloton warheads ...

... these are the direct deaths from a global nuclear war involving 4,400 100-kiloton warheads ...

... and this is how many people might eventually die from famine two years after that global nuclear war ends ...

5,341,000,000

Two years after a nuclear war ends, nearly everyone might face starvation.

There is nowhere to hide.

François Diaz-Maurin  ( @francoisdm ) is the associate editor for nuclear affairs at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists .

Thomas Gaulkin  ( @ThomasGaulkin ) is multimedia editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists .

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References & Acknowledgments

This article is based on the work of many researchers who have studied the impacts of nuclear war since the 1980s. The author wishes to thank in particular Alex Glaser from Princeton University, Alan Robock from Rutgers University, and Alex Wellerstein from the Stevens Institute of Technology.

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As the Russian invasion of Ukraine shows, nuclear threats are real, present, and dangerous

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Keywords: blast wave , climate impacts of nuclear warfare , famine , food insecurity , nuclear war , nuclear weapons , nuclear winter , radioactive fallout , societal collapse , thermonuclear weapons Topics: Investigative Reporting , Multimedia , Nuclear Risk , Nuclear Weapons

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I must say that I am SICKENED BY THE FACT THAT WE NEED WEAPONS LIKE THESE!!! I WISH THERE WAS A TREATY TO DO AWAY WITH ALL NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND ALL DATA PERTAINING TO NUKES!!!!

The data you need to keep. You would not want to forget just how deadly they are would you?

Still…. You got to laugh eh!

What is there to laugh about?

I love this comment.

Nowhere to hide is bs. There are no nuclear target zones in South America or Africa.

good. you would die of starvation then.

New Zealand and Australia are both shown as having minimal starvation effects. While Australia is well within the worst case scenarios of the Soot effects New Zealand is on the edge of even the worst case extrapolations of these effects. Australia will get hit by Boat refugees, but again New Zealand will get minimal “boat refugees”. Quite simply any attempt to get to New Zealand in a half-arsed overloaded boat will see everyone drown. The only boats like to make it are well supplied vessels carrying modest numbers of people.

Think also about collapsing supply chains. I’m in Canberra, and there’s no likely nuclear target anywhere near here. In a major US-Russia/China nuclear war, the main challenge Australia will face is feeding its own population, plus large numbers of refugees fleeing south from the equatorial regions – plus climate effects. But when supply chains collapse – we lose fuel so can’t get food to the market – and maybe our electric grids collapse too. Its grim here – maybe not to the same extent as the northern hemisphere – but still it won’t be easy for us.

Try reading the article.

If nuclear war happens I would prefer to die in the initial detonation than deal with the slow death of the aftermath. If I survived the initial blast I would probably just end it and not have to deal with the suffering.

Good. The rest of us will need your resources and you lack mentality to survive anyway.

Your Mom’s basement isn’t the bunker you think it is.

Just waiting for your moment of glory eh? You can have your survivalist libertarian fantasy. It won’t work out how you imagine though.

“Survive” haha 😀 Where? Are you 12 years old?

Excellent article. The information given is very unfortunate but also very factual. If a global thermonuclear war ever does occur, you don’t want to be a survivor.

We must stop pouring gasoline on the fire in Ukraine. The most important thing we’ll do in our lives is put an end to this war and negotiate a settlement. The binary view of Amercan exceptionalism vs bad scary Putin is going to end us all, including the awful people making money from soldiers and innocents dying. Tactical nuclear strikes are a myth, this article and others like it should be required reading.

Since the US has repudiated or withdrawn from so many of the treaties already negotiated, I see no way anyone would bother to negotiate any new treaties with the US. How could they trust us?

Your assertion that “the US has repudiated or withdrawn from so many treaties,” is inaccurate, overstated, and made without proper context. Sticking to nuclear treaties: (1) the United States withdrew form the INF Treaty AFTER striving for over a decade to get the Russian Federation to return to compliance (the Russians illegally developed and deployed nuclear-armed intermediate-range ground-launched ballistic missiles–GLBMs); (2) the United States issued legal countermeasures effectively suspending certain aspects of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) Treaty IN RESPONSE to Russia’s unlawful suspension of treaty, but the US nevertheless remains a Party to the New START Treaty …  Read more »

We must end the war in Ukraine. Even if it were a straight case of a greedy Hitler-like demon making a land grab, we should have to bring it to the negotiating table. But it is far more morally complex than that. Kyiv, Washington and NATO as well as Russia have responsibility for this crisis — and its resolution will be negotiated eventually anyway, if we can avoid a nuclear war. By what moral right do we threaten the lives of children in, say, Ecuador or Sri Lanka because of a struggle for dominance among great powers?

To give in to Putin today would be to acquiesce to nothing less than an endless series of similar confrontations and consequent surrenders. It would solve nothing.The world has been warned of the dangers of nuclear weapons since August 1945, and yet the peril persists virtually unabated. Why? As long as nuclear weapons exist, their inevitable use is assured. The only solution is global disarmament, as unlikely as that may be. The ONLY alternative is global catastrophe..

Probably about as accurate as the climate doom predictions that never actually materialize. The plain simple fact is that there are so many variables that cannot be controlled or accounted for that this is all little more than guessing. One thing is for sure: Those who are prepared and determined to survive will on net long outlive those who are unprepated and give up in the face of prophecies of doom like this one. But thats fine, the rest of us will take your resources.

keep collecting those bottle caps and nuka-cola, surely will be useful in a fallout scenario ?

” climate doom predictions that never actually materialize”

snow crab population is down 90% (and is off the menu for the foreseeable future) because of climate change you dolt, but keep believing your right wing denialist news sources. SMDH.

The US southwest is experiencing a 1200 year drought, Pakistan is under water, massive forest fires in NA and Europe, the east coast of Canada has recorded It’s most powerful storm ever, arctic sea ice at lowest levels and so on and so on, and this was all predicted and this clown still would rather indulge his denialist libertarian fantasies rather than face the truth. Sad.

All the more reason to have a “small” nuclear exchange with Russia. That should slow down the global warming a bring things back in balance. President Biden knows what he is doing.

This isn’t Avatar you dolt. 5 billion people would die, including you.

Not to mention the Eastern States of Australia have been underwater pretty much constantly this year. Japanese Encephalitis is a huge concern in NSW.

What a type of life in it’s ( a nuclear war ) aftermath !!! Scavaging and fighting like dogs trying to survive !!!

How’s that any different than the current situation for many folks around the globe today?

What an odd comment.You say these “prophecies of doom” are “false”, but suggest that “those who are prepated (sic)” will survive. But if the prophecies are false, why would you need to be prepated?

Great article. A masterpiece of presentation. Great research and visual is awsome. Is there anyway to send our illustrious world leaders a copy? Don’t forget to include the nuclear wanabes gnawing at the bit to own nukes. Susan Roy wrote a great book on this topic. “Bomboozled: How The U.S. Government Misled Itself and It’s People Into Believing They Could Survive a Nuclear War.” It’s a great read. By the way a quick comment. You forgot all about EMP’s. The war would be over before it even started. Mass starvation would be in the cards from the get-go.

Dear Julius. Thank you for your comment. We did briefly talk about electromagnetic pulse, which would result from high-altitude nuclear explosions. These would be intended for very specific uses, such as on military targets to damage their computers, communication systems, and other electronic equipment. The role, however, such weapons would have to prevent a nuclear war from starting is unclear. Our article focuses on what is known from the possible consequences of thermonuclear weapons launched on strategic targets and urban areas. Best regards, François

Thank you for pointing that out to me. I see it now. Again I say Kudos for such a well written article.

Thanks for this beautifully presented piece. One comment that gives me a sliver of hope: firestorms would be difficult to get going in most northern cities in high income countries. This was evident in the last world war. Allied bombing succeeded in Hamburg (where the word feuersturm was coined), but failed in Berlin. Hiroshima and Tokyo had firestorms, but both had a lot of densely packed wooden buildings. Wouldn’t it be much tougher in Moscow or New York, say, with concrete, iron and brick, built to withstand fire? Then there are the spread-out US suburbs. And wrt forest fires: there …  Read more »

what about Dresden?

I agree … Thank You

A nuclear war is the most stupid thing a human being can do, with over 12,000 nukes worldwide with most of them 10 times the power of Hiroshjima en Nagasaki bomb, is erasing planet Earth from the galactic map.

Thank you for this most sobering, unvarnished assessment. It’s insanity to have weapons capable of this level of destruction. Profoundly disturbing that there are people in charge of these weapons who are threatening to use them. They must never be used.

America is so dumb for provoking empires like the Soviet Union to nuke America. Instead just let the bad countries slowly go away because that’s what happened a while after the U.S. and Soviets decided not to nuke eachother.

Why? Just Why do we need nuclear weapons? It’s overkill to the highest level. Haven’t we humans learned from Hiroshima and Nagaski? Frightening!

John Gibson: It stopped the war didn’t it? It also saved countless lives if that war had continued.

The Soviet invasion of Japanese-held territory a few days after Hiroshima did as much as the nukes, since the Japanese were afraid of being divided like Korea was and losing the Emperor, so were motivated to surrender to the US first. But also, Japan was starving, isolated by the US Navy, bombed conventionally every night by the USAAF, with no means to continue. Even Curtis LeMay said the A-bombs weren’t really necessary.

Japan had already surrendered. Learn your history.

You learn your history! The invasion of Soviet armies in Japan held China was about to begin, and the Soviets would have fought with as much anger as they did against the Germans, and America was coming up from the South in Okinawa. The bombs, although terrible, were the only thing that made the die hard Japanese go into peace talks.

No the nuclear weapons were simply a useful diplomatic step off point to surrender to avoid the Russian land invasion that had already begun, the nuclear weapons were no worse than the conventional carpet bombing of Japanese cities. The Russians were going to take Japan by force in a land war and the Japanese took this opportunity to capitulate to the west to avoid this. This is all documented and easy to research

Great, no purpose now in making any long term plans….it seems this scenario is and will be inevitable… bye bye human race, nice knowing you

If it ever happens I want to be directly hit by a warhead. No way do I want to survive only to die the slow painful death that follows. Never let a toddler play with matches; never let man have nuclear weapons. Life 101.

ok thanks 🙂 killing myself now

Love the article just wanted to say thank you ?

This reminds me of the “duck and cover” drills we did in elementary school during the 1950s. They actually told us kids that we’d be safe if we hid under our desks.

Colin Meyer: “Duck & Cover” was only meant to protect us from the broken flying glass and other projectiles – not the heat from the blast if it was a direct hit. Besides, if there was a nuclear strike, would the teachers and Nuns want their kids running around outside when it hit? It was by far the best option. In our grammar school, the Nuns had us all go down to the basement cafeteria and stay beneath the tables.

Thank you for the article it was very while explained and informative. Just hope there is a place we can go to and hide. But if one thing won’t kill you the other will. Thank you again . May God be with us.

At least the ice caps would grow from a nuclear winter and give polar bears a better chance….

It’s actually the perfect solution to global warming. An almost immediate effect of cooling, followed by the collapse of human civilization, which is the root cause. It would give the Earth a breather — in a few decades most of the planet would look as rich and wild as the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

It’s hard to argue with that logic, but what a waste of a beautiful opportunity we humans had! More than 50 years ago, we chose poorly and rather than concentrate all our efforts on further developing safe and efficient nuclear power options we continued developing and building WMD. Today we’re spending billions modernizing our weapons, which can’t be used – and barely any government funding of nuclear power development. Imagine if we’d done the opposite and stopped the nuclear weapons programs and instead had built an entire world powered by clean cheap and safe nuclear power. (eg. Molten Salt Reactors …  Read more »

If you track all the billionaires mega yachts heading to remote locations all at once, you should assume the position.

The 1959 movie “On The Beach” gives a fairly realistic view of what would happen. While the northern hemisphere is empty of human life, the radioactivity and fallout slowly drifts into the southern hemisphere, finally killing what is left of humanity. A global thermonuclear war is the end of us all.

Yeah I love that movie (and the book, the movie is very accurate to the source material), but it’s grim as hell

There are plenty of sources showing fallout maps worse case, and NONE of them show radioactivity flowing from north to south of the equator. It doesn’t work that way, real life is not the movies.

Does not work that way – there isn’t a lot of inter-mix between northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere weather patterns.

Also, in the novel by Shute, they use cobalt jacketed nukes, which are purposely designed to spread fallout globally. No one deploys such weapons and have not considered doing so since the 1950s.

I don’t believe the ‘On the Beach’ scenario is accurate.

Better active today than radioactive tomorrow (circa 1970)

Great Piece. I do question the US not starving, Russia not starving, Australia and India not starving. I anticipate the Q theorists, who will one day have their own whack-a-doodle dark web university, to reason that global waring and nuclear winter can easily cancel each other out. To think there are whack-a-doodles on the internet is much less worrying than to think of nuclear deterrence Warhawks. These folks get a military pension, go right into nuclear weapons manufacture, and get saluted every 4rth of July.

Australia is pretty out of the way and we produce a LOT of food. It’ll suck, but we’re in a less awful position.

Brian Whit. I’m pretty sure thats just for a regional nuclear war. I couldn’t find one country that didnt starve in the map of the global nuclear war.

As Nikita Khrushchev said, in the aftermath of a nuclear war, the living will envy the dead.

Until Germany “nuked” the Berlin Research Reactor as a panic reaction to the Fukushima Catastrophe (WTH… Yeah, talk about German Angst!), I was an active member of Civil Defense here – and I deeply appreciate your excellent, factual information about the “N” in CBRN, combined with equally outstanding visuals – thank you for this masterpiece / article! Now I’d really love to see a similar article addressing the “R” side of things (and, according to experts, a much more likely scenario than N – with regard to “blaming the other party” being possible and “uncertainty of how NATO would respond” …  Read more »

To hoard tactical nukes below 100 kilotons is wasteful and should be avoided. Battlefield tactical nukes of under 1,000 kilotons should be built and preserved as highly credible deterrance. Strategic nukes of over 1,000 kilotons should be treasured and kept deployable on outerspace-friendly missiles, to be used within the mesosphere as a climate-control asset to drastically reduce global-warming. So, Bill Gates can be spared of having to think of blocking out the Sun and hatching an artificial sun too for whatever purpose ! LOL !

Where’s my mannequin?!!!

So what you’re saying is in order to stop global warming and reverse it, India and Pakistan need to have an all-out nuclear exchange

What will be the impact of abandoned nuclear power plants in the aftermath of different scenarios discussed in the article? Just for basis of discussion: a 1GWe power plant produces a 5 times greater amount of fission products than the Hiroshima bomb – per day.

Hit the wrong key. Given the collapse of the electrical grid, the cooling ponds would dry. Chernobyl.

This article was similar to the results that I researched during the 1980s while serving as an ICBM launch officer in the US Air Force. The consequences that I could have been responsible for was enough to lead me to resign my commission and leave the Air Force. The one problem with the hypothesis of this article was the yield of the weapons that were used in their calculations. The yields of the weapons on nuclear alert today are many more times more powerful than those used in the hypothesis. An all out nuclear exchange between Russia and the US …  Read more »

Not worth it over a regional dispute

Can we pick a day to send all our nukes into the sun?

It would be the perfect solution to curb climate change, only collateral damage has the same consequences as climate change. The sixth mass extinction once the first explosion is launched, a domino effect impossible to stop, in my humble opinion humanity has an expiration date, by mistake or planning our disappearance is almost a fact.

if you live near an obvious military target u r probably toast. examples are Seattle, SanDiego, Col Springs, Norfolk, JAcksnville, Omaha, etc. I live midway between 2 ANG bases w/tankers, about 60 E of one and 30 W of the other so I’ll get heavy fallout. Cooked.

Mt. Tambora was 33 Gt TNT equivalent, in one place, launching pulverized rock into the stratosphere. It caused the year without a summer. That is our baseline. The nuclear winter scenarios you post here are unrealistic with respect to how a nuclear war would be fought and how easily cities burn.

China, Russia, Britain, the United States and France have agreed that a further spread of nuclear arms and a nuclear war should be avoided, according to a joint statement by the five nuclear powers.

“We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” the English-language version of the statement read.

The joint statement echoed the words spoken decades earlier by two leaders of nuclear superpowers: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” This statement was first made by Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at their summit in Geneva in 1985.

If you add-up all the nuclear tests done over the years, it’s reasonable to postulate that we have been living in a default state of nuclear winter. Slow freeze, slow poison version. This article talks about regional wars involving perhaps 100 warheads in the low-yield range as still having a profound effect. That is perhaps 100-300MT detonated in a short period of time with resulting fires. Consider that 1958 saw approx 102MT of tests done. In 1962, there was 140MT detonated. There has been approximately 60-80MT per year between 1963-1983, falling to less than 40MT after 1985. Many of these …  Read more »

Not much optimism when, in the face of all these otherwise terrifying data, the people most likely to push the button believe that god, in some form or another, will protect the chosen. Can’t avoid nuclear war when it’s actually hoped for.

I don’t understand one thing. According to the information above, UV radiation is supposed to increase, but at the same time, the large amount of soot in the atmosphere is supposed to block the sun at least partially. Don’t these two effects work against each other, i.e., the ozone layer is being destroyed, but the increased soot blocks UV radiation?

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An unnecessary evil: the discursive battle over the meaning of nuclear weapons

‘Necessary Evil’ was the Boeing B-29-45-MO Superfortress airplane assigned to photograph the effects of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945.

I remember the first time I visited Hiroshima. It was a sweltering week toward the end of August 2012. Government officials, civil society activists and survivors had recently marked the 67th anniversary of the nuclear explosion that devastated the city in 1945. I was there to take part in the World Congress of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW)—a global federation of medical groups that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for its effort to raise awareness of ‘ the catastrophic consequences of atomic warfare ’.

I was working for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) at the time, and I thought I knew all I needed to about nuclear weapons. Motivated by youthful arrogance and an urge to leave my mark on the world, I had convinced myself that we could ban nuclear weapons if we just wanted it enough.

I no longer remember what I had expected to discover in Hiroshima. But as I was driven from the airport in an aging Toyota Comfort fitted with the white, embroidered seat covers so characteristic of Japanese taxis, the first thought that struck me was how utterly normal – how unmarked – the city looked.

Crossing Tsurumi Bridge into Naka Ward, the site of the 1945 blast’s epicenter, I saw a typical Japanese city teeming with cute, matchbox-looking cars, glossy skyscraper hotels, sake bars and okonomiyaki restaurants packed in neon-lit lanes. With my car window rolled down, I watched people going about their daily business, as if nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened in the neighborhood.

I remember thinking to myself, ‘is this really Hiroshima? Can this really be the city I’ve seen devastated, “ flattened and smooth like the palm of a hand ”, in all those black-and-white photos?’

It was only later that day, as I walked across the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, that I started to notice the scars left by the 1945 nuclear explosion. I looked through the massive saddle-shaped Memorial cenotaph, leading the eye through a vacuum of emptiness, meekly promising not to ‘repeat the error’. Moving north, I saw the monument built to commemorate the unbearably high number of child victims from the nuclear explosion. It was surrounded by thousands of colorful paper cranes, all folded to fulfill 12-year old Sadako Sasaki ’s dying wish for a world without nuclear weapons. On the other side of the Motoyasu River, I looked up at the famous skeletal remains of the A-Bomb Dome, in a constant state of near-collapse, a symbol of the transient nature of painful memories.

Hiroshima Victims Memorial Cenotaph

Children’s Peace Monument

Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome

These were the visible scars of Hiroshima. However, it wasn’t until I started to listen that I realized the real impact of the explosion was not to be found in the city’s monuments, but in the minds of its people.

In the following days, I heard many testimonies of the victims and survivors of the nuclear explosion—the hibakusha. Their testimonies would shake me to my core, forcing me to confront my own prejudices: In my rush to devise a plan for how nuclear weapons could be banned, I had forgotten to ask the more fundamental question of what nuclear weapons really mean for humanity.

I would come to realize from these discussions that there existed in my own – and, I would later discover, the public ­– imagination, two distinct and partially conflicting ‘mental images’ of nuclear weapons, to borrow a term from the American writer Walter Lippmann. One is based on the testimonies of the hibakusha and the rules and principles of international humanitarian law; the other, on the fear of a world-destroying nuclear war.

The fact that the real meaning of nuclear weapons is not yet settled in the public imagination may explain, for example, the seemingly paradoxical findings from the ICRC’s Millennials on War survey. While the survey demonstrated widespread consensus among millennials that nuclear weapons are a threat to humanity – with 84 percent of respondents answering that the use of nuclear weapons in wars or armed conflict is never acceptable — almost half of those surveyed also held that nuclear weapons are an effective instrument of deterrence.

The co-existence of these two ‘mental images’ explains why the fault lines in this debate are so entrenched between proponents and opponents of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and between believers and critics of nuclear deterrence. The irreconcilable nature of the debate and lack of common ground between these camps is due to the fact that these groups mean two different things when they refer to ‘nuclear weapons’.

An effects-based framing: the call for nuclear prohibition

The first ‘mental image’ is an effects-based understanding of nuclear weapons – one focused on the documented consequences of nuclear weapons as a means of warfare. This framing is based on the evidence of suffering and devastation caused by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, evoked by the testimonies of the hibakusha and the accounts of those that attempted, in near-impossible conditions, to alleviate the pain of those dying and injured.

The archives of the ICRC offer an unsettling glimpse into the horrific reality behind this image. A few weeks after the bombing of Hiroshima, ICRC delegate Fritz Bilfinger arrived in Hiroshima to assess the damage. The telegram he sent back to Dr. Marcel Junod, the ICRC Head of Delegation in Tokyo, paints a chilling picture:

“city wiped out; eighty percent all hospitals destroyed or seriously damaged; inspected two emergency hospitals, conditions beyond description, full stop; effects of bomb mysteriously serious, stop.”

From the perspective of Junod, who travelled to Hiroshima a few days after he had received Bilfinger’s telegram to assist the victims, nuclear weapons were a weapon amongst other inhumane weapons. Admittedly a horrific and uniquely destructive weapon, but still a weapon, comparable in kind to the poison gas used with cruel effect during the First World War. From this perspective, the question of nuclear weapons became a relatively straight-forward one of whether this particular tool of war, given its consequences and in light of the agreed rules of war , should be allowed for use in armed conflict.

No stranger to the horrors of war, Junod himself seemed to have had no doubt about how to answer this question. In his journal reflections from his experiences in Hiroshima, he appealed for nuclear weapons to be banned outright—a position later adopted by the ICRC and the entire Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement.

A fear-based framing: the theory of nuclear deterrence

In the years and decades following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the effects-based framing of nuclear weapons espoused by Junod would be challenged by an alternative understanding – an image informed not by the lived experiences of the hibakusha and other eye witnesses, but by the fear of an unprecedented, world-destroying nuclear war.

The seeds of this alternative framing of nuclear weapons originate in the minds of some of those that first developed them. After having watched the fireball from the Trinity nuclear test in 1946, Robert J. Oppenheimer, the head scientist of the Los Alamos laboratory, turned to Sanskrit scripture to make sense of what he had seen: ‘ Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’ .

Fueled by the fear of an all-out nuclear war caused by the dramatic expansion of nuclear arsenals during the Cold War, a fear-based framing of nuclear weapons took hold of the public imagination. In the minds of nuclear policy makers and civil society activists alike, the use of nuclear weapons was increasingly understood in eschatological terms as an unimaginable ‘doomsday’, ‘apocalypse’, or ‘Armageddon’.

This discursive turn in the nuclear weapons debate had several consequences. As noted by Nina Tannenwald in her seminal study The Nuclear Taboo , the understanding of nuclear weapons as an exceptional – indeed, incomparable – weapon, gave rise to an increasingly strong ‘taboo’, an implicit, normative prohibition against the use of nuclear weapons. The gradual emergence of this taboo explains, according to Tannenwald, why nuclear weapons have not been used in an armed conflict since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

However, while delegitimizing the use of nuclear weapons, the framing of nuclear weapons in terms of an unprecedented and unimaginable doomsday actually legitimized their possession.

According to the logic of what would, in the years following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, become known as the ‘theory of nuclear deterrence’, no government in its right mind would ever risk a conflict to escalate into a nuclear war, precisely because of the unacceptable devastation that would be visited upon all humankind by such a war.

By hypothesizing that international peace and stability required the constant threat of its antipode – all-out nuclear war – the theory of nuclear deterrence made it possible to view the threat of use of these weapons as a ‘necessary evil’ and a symbol of responsibility, rationality and power. The extreme threat of nuclear war would not only guarantee a future non-use of nuclear weapons, but also a perpetual state of equilibrium between the States that possessed these weapons.

An abstract battlefield, above the law?

This fear-based framing of nuclear weapons turned the question initially posed by Marcel Junod on its head. What had started out as an evidence- and effects-based debate about the legitimacy of the use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict shifted into a highly speculative debate about how the threat of total annihilation could be used to prevent war in general, and nuclear war in particular.

By framing nuclear weapons not as an inhumane means of warfare but instead as an abstract construct outside and beyond any real-world battlefield considerations, the fear-based framing lifted nuclear weapons out of the conceptual framework – international humanitarian law – that had been tried and tested to limit the harmful effects of armed conflict. Limits could not, after all, be imposed on an absolute.

This discursive turn pre-empted – for many years – any attempt to turn Junod’s appeal for an outright ban on nuclear weapons into a serious policy proposal. By positing that international peace and stability required the constant threat of use of nuclear weapons, nuclear abolitionists were left with the impossible task of proving a logical fallacy: to substantiate that their call for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons would not imperil global security – or even worse, lead to a third world war.

Back to reality: fighting for the collective future of humanity

Many people have become accustomed to thinking about nuclear weapons in terms of an unimaginable doomsday, seemingly forgetting a harsh reality: Nuclear weapons have been used, twice, causing not only entirely imaginable, but extensive, actual and long-term suffering amongst the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yet despite their very real consequences, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened a lifetime ago. Even with the recent ruling of the Hiroshima District Court to recognize dozens of additional survivors from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the day will soon come when there is no one left to tell the first-hand accounts of suffering and devastation caused by the attacks. This leaves those who have listened to the hibakusha with a special responsibility to ensure that their stories are not lost. And a responsibility for the rest of us to frame policy on nuclear weapons not by the fear of a world-destroying nuclear war, but by the all too real consequences of their use.

In fact, it was only when the testimonies of the hibakusha and the reality of the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons were reinserted as the starting point for international discussions about these weapons that the proposal for a total ban regained its appeal. The joint efforts of States, international organizations, civil society and researchers over the past ten years to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian impact and change the discourse represent a strategic move to cultivate a common understanding of nuclear weapons as horrific and unjustifiable means of warfare.

As stated by the former ICRC President Jacob Kellenberger in his historic speech to the Geneva Diplomatic Corps ahead of the 2010 Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty:

“The currency of [the nuclear weapons debate] must ultimately be about human beings, about the fundamental rules of international humanitarian law, and about the collective future of humanity”.

The adoption, seven years later, of the landmark Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) was a concrete result of these efforts. The entry into force and future impact of this Treaty will depend on whether its proponents manage to keep the testimonies of the hibakusha and the evidence of humanitarian consequences front and center in the public imagination.

As Mrs. Keiko Ogura , who was eight years old when she witnessed the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, told us during my last visit: “I am a witness. Now, by listening to me, you are a witness too. I urge you to take action to ensure that the tragedy of Hiroshima is never repeated”.

• Magnus Løvold, Courage, responsibility and the path towards a world without nuclear weapons: a message to youth , August 21, 2019
• Helen Durham, The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons one year on: Reflections from Hiroshima , September 20, 2018
• Elizabeth Minor, The prohibition of nuclear weapons: Assisting victims and remediating the environment , October 10, 2017
• Ellen Policinski, Majority of governments vote for negotiations to prohibit nuclear weapons , August 29, 2016
• Ellen Policinski & Vincent Bernard, Nuclear weapons: Rising in defence of humanity , July 27, 2016

Conceive, standardize, integrate: the past, present, and future of adopting distinctive emblems and signs under IHL

10 mins read  Analysis / History / Humanitarian Action / Law and Conflict Samit D’Cunha

Why is the ICRC concerned by ‘harmful information’ in war?

10 mins read  Analysis / History / Humanitarian Action / Law and Conflict Joelle Rizk

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Article contents

Nuclear weapons and international conflict: theories and empirical evidence.

• Daniel S. Geller Daniel S. Geller Daniel S. Geller is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Wayne State University. He conducts research and teaches in the areas of International Politics, Defense Policy, and Foreign Policy. From 2000 through 2010 Dr. Geller served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of State, Office of Technology and Assessments, and in 2009 he was a member of a Senior Advisory Group to the U.S. Strategic Command on the Nuclear Posture Review. Dr. Geller was a Co-Principal Investigator on an NSF grant involving the expansion of the militarized interstate dispute database. He has published extensively in books, journals and edited collections on the subject of interstate war. His most recent books are Nations at War: A Scientific Study of International Conflict (Cambridge University Press) co-authored with J. David Singer and The Construction and Cumulation of Knowledge in International Relations (Blackwell, Ltd.) co-edited with John A. Vasquez.
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.347
• Published online: 27 July 2017

The balance of conventional military capabilities is intrinsic to understanding patterns of war among nations. However, cumulative knowledge relating to the effects of nuclear weapons possession on conflict interaction is largely absent. Framework is provided for analyzing the results of quantitative empirical research on this question and to identify any extant strong and consistent patterns in the interactions of states that can be associated with the possession of nuclear weapons.

Since 1945, a vast, sophisticated, and contradictory literature has developed on the implications of nuclear weaponry for patterns of international conflict and war. This theoretical and empirical work has principally focused on the conflict effects of these weapons for the interaction of nuclear-armed states, although a growing number of studies have explored the impact of a state’s possession of nuclear weapons on the behavior of nonnuclear opponents. Given the destructive capacity of these weapons and their questionable value for battlefield use, most of this work has concentrated on the requirements for successful deterrence. In categorizing the studies, some scholars note that “classical deterrence theory” derives from the Realist paradigm of international politics and subdivide this theory into two complementary strands: structural (or neorealist) deterrence theory and decision-theoretic deterrence theory. In contrast, other analysts choose to classify work on nuclear deterrence into three schools of thought: nuclear irrelevance; risk manipulation, escalation, and limited war; and the nuclear revolution. The essence of these divisions involves a debate about what the possession of nuclear weapons does for a state that controls them. Does the possession of these weapons affect the behavior of nuclear and nonnuclear opponents in disputes over contested values? Do the weapons impart political influence and hold military utility, or are they useless as tools for deterrence, compellence, or war?

• nuclear weapons
• crisis escalation
• nuclear war
• international conflict
• empirical international relations theory

Introduction

The balance of conventional military capabilities is intrinsic to understanding patterns of war among nations (Geller, 2000a ). However, cumulative knowledge relating to the effects of nuclear weapons possession on conflict interaction is largely absent. This article seeks to provide a framework for analyzing the results of quantitative empirical research on this question and to identify any extant strong and consistent patterns in the interactions of states that can be associated with the possession of nuclear weapons.

Since 1945 , a vast, sophisticated, and contradictory literature has developed on the implications of nuclear weaponry for patterns of international conflict and war. 1 This theoretical and empirical work has principally focused on the conflict effects of these weapons for the interaction of nuclear-armed states, although a growing number of studies have explored the impact of a state’s possession of nuclear weapons on the behavior of nonnuclear opponents. Given the destructive capacity of these weapons and their questionable value for battlefield use, most of this work has concentrated on the requirements for successful deterrence. In categorizing the studies, Zagare and Kilgour ( 2000 ), for example, note that “classical deterrence theory” derives from the Realist paradigm of international politics, and they subdivide this theory into two complementary strands: structural (or neorealist) deterrence theory and decision-theoretic deterrence theory. In contrast, Jervis ( 1979 , 1984 , 1988 ), among others, chooses to classify work on nuclear deterrence into three schools of thought: nuclear irrelevance; risk manipulation, escalation, and limited war; and the nuclear revolution. The essence of these divisions involves a debate about what the possession of nuclear weapons does for a state that controls them. Does the possession of these weapons affect the behavior of nuclear and non-nuclear opponents in disputes over contested values? Do the weapons impart political influence and hold military utility or are they useless as tools for deterrence, compellence, or war?

Nuclear strategy has principally concerned itself with the efficacy of nuclear weapons as a deterrent. One school of thought—nuclear revolution theory—characterized by the works of Brodie ( 1946 , 1959 , 1978 ), Waltz ( 1981 , 1990 , 1993 , 2003 ), and Jervis ( 1984 , 1988 , 1989a ), holds that the incredibly rapid and destructive effects of nuclear weapons creates a strong disincentive for nuclear-armed states to engage each other in disputes that might escalate to the level of war. The “nuclear revolution” means that nuclear weapons can deter aggression at all levels of violence and makes confrontations and crises between nuclear-armed states rare events. The maintenance of a nuclear second-strike capability is all that is required for a successful military deterrent force.

A second school of thought—risk manipulation, escalation, and limited war—emphasizes the problem of “risk” in confrontations between states in possession of nuclear weapons. The issue here is that, in disputes between nuclear-armed states, the use of nuclear weapons carries such enormous costs for both sides that any threat to use the weapons lacks inherent credibility. While allowing that a nuclear second-strike capability can deter a full-scale nuclear strike by an opponent, these analysts argue that states will manipulate the risk of dispute escalation and war for the purposes of deterrence and compellence (e.g., Gray, 1979 ; Kahn, 1962 , 1965 ; Schelling, 1960 , 1966 ). In this view, crises and brinkmanship tactics become surrogates for war in confrontations between nations in possession of nuclear weapons (Snyder & Diesing, 1977 ). Associated with this thesis is the concept of the “stability-instability paradox” (Snyder, 1965 ), whereby nuclear-armed states are secure in the deterrence of general nuclear war but are free to exploit military asymmetries (including strategic and tactical nuclear asymmetries as well as conventional military advantages) at lower levels of violence (e.g., Kissinger, 1957 ).

Yet another perspective holds nuclear weapons to be “irrelevant” as special instruments of either statecraft or war (Mueller 1988 , 1989 ). 2 In this argument, nuclear weapons are not substantially different in their deterrent effect from conventional military forces and, in John Mueller’s view, developed nations will not engage each other in either conventional or nuclear wars—having already witnessed the devastation that can be produced with both types of weaponry. A related argument holds that the possession of nuclear weapons provides little or no coercive advantage in confrontations with either nuclear-armed or nonnuclear states. A number of quantitative empirical studies of deterrence failures and successes (in both direct- and extended-deterrence cases) have produced results supportive of this thesis. Additionally, a notable formal mathematical study of deterrence by Zagare and Kilgour ( 2000 ) demonstrates that raising the costs of war above a certain threshold has no effect on deterrence stability. In this work, Zagare and Kilgour also maintain that, while nuclear weapons may increase the costs associated with a deterrent threat, they simultaneously decrease the credibility of the threat—and hence the stability of deterrence. These contrary effects serve to minimize the impact of nuclear weapons on effective deterrence. In short, nuclear and nonnuclear crises should exhibit the same patterns of escalation.

Over the past 35 years, large-scale quantitative empirical studies have attempted to generate evidence relating to these theories. Discussion of some of these works follows.

Nuclear Weapons and Patterns of International Conflict

The nuclear revolution.

The term “nuclear revolution” was coined by Robert Jervis ( 1989a , ch. 1), although the initial recognition of the alterations in patterns of international politics likely to be wrought by nuclear weapons should be credited to Bernard Brodie ( 1946 ). As Jervis has noted:

the changes nuclear weapons have produced in world politics constitute a true revolution in the relationships between force and foreign policy. The fact that neither [the United States nor the Soviet Union] can protect itself without the other’s cooperation drastically alters the way in which force can be used or threatened . . . The result is to render much of our prenuclear logic inadequate. As Bernard Brodie has stressed, the first question to ask about a war is what the political goal is that justifies the military cost. When the cost is likely to be very high, only the most valuable goals are worth pursuing by military means . . . What prospective . . . goals could possibly justify the risk of total destruction? (Jervis, 1989a , p. 13, 24)

Moreover, for Jervis ( 1989b ), that this destruction was essentially unavoidable under any plausible strategy constituted the essence of the nuclear revolution. Jervis ( 1989a , pp. 23–25) went on to enumerate changes in international politics directly attributable to the presence of nuclear weaponry, including the absence of war among the great powers, the declining frequency of great power crises, and the tenuous link between the conventional or nuclear balance among great powers and the political outcomes of their disputes. 3

Kenneth Waltz ( 1981 , 1990 , 1993 , 2003 , 2008 ) has been exceptionally prominent in developing and forwarding the thesis that nuclear weapons are a force for peace and that nuclear proliferation will lead to declining frequencies of war. Waltz argues that nuclear weapons are simply more effective in dissuading states from engaging in war than are conventional weapons:

In a conventional world, states going to war can at once believe that they may win and that, should they lose, the price of defeat will be bearable (Waltz, 1990 , p. 743). A little reasoning leads to the conclusions that to fight nuclear wars is all but impossible and that to launch an offensive that might prompt nuclear retaliation is obvious folly. To reach these conclusions, complicated calculations are not required, only a little common sense (Waltz in Sagan & Waltz, 1995 , p. 113). The likelihood of war decreases as deterrent and defensive capabilities increase. Nuclear weapons make wars hard to start. These statements hold for small as for big nuclear powers. Because they do, the gradual spread of nuclear weapons is more to be welcomed than feared. (Waltz in Sagan & Waltz, 1995 , p. 45)

Given this logic, evidence consistent with an absence of war or the use of force short of war between nuclear-armed states and few (or a declining frequency of) crises between nuclear powers would be supportive of the nuclear revolution thesis.

Empirical Evidence

A number of quantitative empirical studies have produced evidence relevant to the nuclear revolution thesis. In an early study of the effects of nuclear weapons possession, Bueno de Mesquita and Riker ( 1982 ) present both a formal mathematical model and an empirical test of deterrence success. The model assumes the possibility of nuclear war (i.e., the use of nuclear weapons) when nuclear asymmetry exists (only one side possesses nuclear weapons), but assumes the absence of nuclear war among nuclear-armed states. The model indicates a rising probability of nuclear war resulting from nuclear proliferation to the midpoint of the international system, where half of the states possess nuclear weapons, at which point any further proliferation results in a declining probability of nuclear war. When all nations possess nuclear weapons, the probability of nuclear war is zero. The supporting empirical analysis uses early Correlates of War (COW) Project Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data, for the years 1945 through 1976 , for four classes of dyads: nuclear/nuclear, nuclear/nonnuclear with a nuclear ally, nuclear/nonnuclear, and nonnuclear/nonnuclear. The analysis examines the distribution of threats, interventions, and wars across the four dyad classes and indicates that the presence of a symmetric nuclear threat constrains conflict by reducing its likelihood of escalation to the level of war. The two classes of nuclear/nuclear and nuclear/nonnuclear with a nuclear ally have the highest probabilities of employing only threats and the lowest probabilities of engaging in interventions and wars. This evidence is consistent with the predictions of the nuclear revolution thesis. 4

Rauchhaus ( 2009 ) provides a multivariate analysis of factors associated with both militarized interstate disputes and wars for all dyads between 1885 and 2000 (MID database). The data set used in his study contains 611,310 dyad years, and tests were performed on time sections from 1885–1944 and 1945–2000 . He reports that in symmetric nuclear dyads (both states possess nuclear weapons) the odds of war drop precipitously. Rauchhaus concludes that Waltz and other nuclear revolution theorists find support for their thesis in the patterns uncovered by his study.

Asal and Beardsley ( 2007 ) examine the relationship between the severity of violence in international crises and the number of states involved in the crises that possess nuclear weapons. Using data from the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project for the years 1918 through 2000 , their results indicate that crises in which nuclear actors are involved are more likely to end without violence and that, as the number of nuclear-armed states engaged in crises increases, the probability of war decreases. This evidence is interpreted as supportive of the nuclear revolution thesis: the presence of nuclear weapon states in international crises has a violence-dampening effect due to the potential consequences of escalation and the use of nuclear force.

In a second study, Beardsley and Asal ( 2009a ) hypothesize that nuclear weapons act as shields against aggressive behavior directed toward their possessors. Specifically, it is postulated that nuclear states will be constrained in engaging in aggressive actions toward other nuclear-armed powers. Data is drawn from the ICB Project for the years 1945 through 2000 , using directed dyads as the unit of analysis. The results indicate that nuclear opponents of other nuclear-armed powers are limited in their use of violent force. However, Beardsley and Asal ( 2009a , p. 251) also note that the “restraining effect of nuclear weapons on violent aggression does not appear to affect the propensity for actors to engage each other in general crises, in contrast with the expectations of . . . the ‘nuclear revolution’ model. . .”

Additional results consistent with the nuclear revolution thesis are reported in a study by Sobek, Foster, and Robinson ( 2012 ). Using directed-dyad year with MID data for the period between 1945 and 2001 , the study examines the effects of efforts to develop nuclear weapons on the targeting of the proliferator in militarized disputes. Sobek et al. ( 2012 , p. 160) conclude that “. . .if a state . . . gains nuclear weapons, then the odds of being targeted in a militarized dispute falls.” States developing nuclear weapons are high-frequency targets in MIDs, but “. . .[t]argeting drops precipitously when [joint] acquisition is achieved” (Sobek et al., 2012 , p. 160).

However, Bell and Miller ( 2015 ) present evidence that is counter to the preceding studies. Using data collected by Rauchhaus ( 2009 ), they contend that nuclear dyads are neither more nor less likely to fight wars or engage in sub-war conflicts than are nonnuclear dyads. They argue that the evidence indicating a strong negative probability of war in symmetric nuclear dyads is due to the statistical model used by Rauchhaus, whereas the positive association for nuclear dyads and crisis frequency reported by Beardsley and Asal ( 2009a ) is due to selection effects (i.e., nuclear weapons possession is more a consequence rather than a cause of conflict).

The nuclear revolution thesis maintains that there should be a general absence of war or the use of force short of war among nuclear-armed states. In addition, there is the expectation of few (or a diminishing number of) crises in nuclear dyads, as the fear of escalation will exert a powerful constraint on aggressive behavior.

Bueno de Mesquita and Riker ( 1982 ) present compelling evidence that nuclear asymmetry or the absence of nuclear weapons on both sides of a conflict are more likely to be associated with war. In their data, between 1945 and 1976 , there were 17 cases of war between nonnuclear states, two cases of war in asymmetric nuclear dyads, and zero cases of war in either nuclear dyads or nuclear/nonnuclear dyads where the nonnuclear party had a nuclear-armed ally. Rauchhaus’s ( 2009 ) study also presents evidence that symmetric nuclear dyads are unlikely to engage in war. The article by Asal and Beardsley ( 2007 ) reports results consistent with those of Bueno de Mesquita and Riker ( 1982 ). Specifically, crises ending in war are not uncommon for confrontations engaging nonnuclear states and for confrontations in which only one state possesses nuclear weapons. However, as the number of nuclear participants increases beyond one, the probability of full-scale war diminishes. Only the results of Bell and Miller ( 2015 ) stand in contrast with the findings on symmetric nuclear dyads and the probability of war. Similarly, Beardsley and Asal ( 2009a ) show findings consistent with the nuclear revolution thesis: symmetric nuclear dyads engage in few crises where violence is the “preeminent” form of interaction. This conclusion is also supported by the findings reported by Sobek et al. ( 2012 ). However, Asal and Beardsley ( 2007 ) and Beardsley and Asal ( 2009a ) also note that there appears to be no constraining effect produced by nuclear weapons on the occurrence of crises that exhibit lower levels of hostility in symmetric nuclear dyads.

Since the advent of nuclear weapons in 1945 , there has been one war between nuclear-armed powers: the Kargil War of 1999 involving India and Pakistan (Geller, 2005 , p. 101). This conflict remained at the conventional level and surpassed the threshold of 1,000 battle deaths set by the Correlates of War Project for classification as a war (Singer & Small, 1972 ; Small & Singer, 1982 ). However, Paul ( 2005 , p. 13) argues that, despite the conventional military asymmetry between India and Pakistan (in India’s favor) that existed at the time of the Kargil War, the development of Pakistani nuclear weapons actually permitted Pakistan to launch a conventional invasion of the disputed territory of Kashmir. As Paul explains, only in a long war could India mobilize its material superiority, but as a result of the development of Pakistani nuclear weapons, a long war becomes “inconceivable” without incurring the risk of nuclear escalation. Hence, Pakistan’s leaders were emboldened to initiate a conventional war behind the shield of their nuclear deterrent despite their conventional military inferiority. This sole case of conventional war between nuclear-armed states—and its facilitation by the risk of unacceptable escalation provided by nuclear weapons—stands in stark contradiction to the predictions of nuclear revolution theory. 5

These collective results provide only partial support for the nuclear revolution thesis. As the theory suggests, war between nuclear-armed states should be nonexistent or a very rare event. This prediction, to date (with one notable exception), has been upheld. However, Beardsley and Asal ( 2009a ) report that symmetric nuclear dyads engage in an unexpectedly large number of crises—in contradiction to the predictions of nuclear revolution theory. This is an empirical question that will receive additional examination in the following section.

Risk Manipulation, Escalation, and Limited War

A second school of thought—risk manipulation, escalation, and limited war—finds its archetypal expression in the seminal work of Henry Kissinger ( 1957 ). According to this thesis (and counter to that of nuclear revolution theory), the possession of a nuclear second-strike capability may deter a nuclear attack by an opponent on one’s home territory, but not much else. Kissinger argued that the United States (and its NATO allies) required the ability to conduct successful combat operations at levels of violence below that of general nuclear war if the protection of Europe against Soviet aggression was a political goal. Some years later, Snyder ( 1965 ) discussed this as what was later termed the “stability-instability paradox.” The essence of the paradox was that stability at the level of general nuclear war permitted the exploitation of military asymmetries at lower levels of violence—including strategic (counterforce) and tactical nuclear wars as well as conventional forms of combat. The thesis that strategic nuclear weapons possessed little political or military utility other than deterring a nuclear attack on one’s home territory led to a number of works devoted to the analysis of tactics for coercive bargaining and limited war by Thomas Schelling ( 1960 , 1966 ), Herman Kahn ( 1960 , 1962 , 1965 ), and others. 6

As Snyder and Diesing ( 1977 , p. 450) maintain, the primary effect of the possession of nuclear weapons on the behavior of nuclear adversaries is the creation of new constraints on the ultimate range of their coercive tactics—a result of the extraordinary increase in the interval between the value of the interests at stake in a conflict and the potential costs of war. They note that before the advent of nuclear weapons, this interval was comparatively small and states could more readily accept the risk of war in a coercive bargaining crisis or engage in war in order to avoid the loss of a contested value. In contradistinction, given even small numbers of nuclear weapons in the stockpiles of states, it is far more difficult to conceive of an issue worth incurring the high risk of nuclear war, much less the cost of actually fighting one. 7

According to this thesis, a direct result of the constraints created by the presence of nuclear weapons has been the attempt by nuclear powers to control, in a more finely calibrated manner, the threat and application of force in disputes with other nuclear-armed states. These developments find theoretical and empirical expression in the concept of escalation , which is defined as the sequential expansion of the scope or intensity of conflict (Osgood & Tucker, 1967 , p. 127, 188). 8 In most standard formulations, escalation is conceived as a generally “controllable and reversible process,” 9 which a rational decision maker can employ in conflict situations as an instrument of state policy (Osgood & Tucker, 1967 , p. 188). Decision makers estimate the relative bargaining power of the rivals and engage in increasingly coercive tactics that are designed to undermine the opponent’s resolve. Controlled escalation occurs when each side is capable of inflicting major or unacceptable damage on the other but avoids this while attempting to influence the opponent with measured increases in the conflict level that incorporate the threat of possible continued expansion.

The measured application of force and the ability to control escalation in nuclear disputes are seen—by these strategic theorists—as indispensable for securing political values while minimizing risk and cost (Osgood & Tucker, 1967 , p. 137; Russett, 1988 , p. 284). A preeminent theorist in this school, Herman Kahn ( 1965 , p. 3), described escalation as “an increase in the level of conflict . . . [often assuming the form of] a competition in risk-taking or . . . resolve.” As this theory developed, conflict analysts elaborated the risks involved in the process and incorporated the manipulation of these risks as a possible tactic in one’s strategy. 10

Clearly, nuclear weapons have not altered the values at stake in interstate disputes (and the desire to avoid political loss), but rather have increased the rapid and immediate costs of war. As a result, in a severe conflict between nuclear powers, the decision maker’s dilemma is to construct a strategy to secure political interests through coercive actions that raise the possibility of war without pushing the risk to an intolerable level. Some analysts argue that the solution to this problem has entailed an increase in the “threshold of provocation,” providing greater area of coercive maneuver in the threat, display, and limited use of force (Osgood & Tucker, 1967 , pp. 144–145; Snyder & Diesing, 1977 , p. 451). Hostile interaction between nuclear powers under this higher provocation threshold can range from verbal threats and warnings, to military deployments and displays, to the use of force in limited wars. Hence, in disputes between nuclear powers, it is argued that military force should be viewed as requisite but “potentially catastrophic power” that must be carefully managed and controlled within the bounds of reciprocally recognized constraints (Osgood & Tucker 1967 , p. 137).

It is frequently stated that the principal exemplar of this new form of competition is the local crisis. Obviously, crises have an extensive history in international politics, but the argument is made that the nuclear age has produced an expansion of steps on the escalation ladder and has intensified the maneuvering of nuclear rivals for dominant position in conflicts below the level of all-out war. For example, Snyder and Diesing note that:

the expanded range of crisis tactics in the nuclear era can be linked to a new conception of crises as surrogates for war, rather than merely dangerous incidents that might lead to war. . . [S]ince war is no longer a plausible option between nuclear powers, they have turned to threats of force and the demonstrative use of force short of war as a means of getting their way. The winner of the encounter is the one who can appear the most resolved to take risks and stand up to risks. (Snyder & Diesing, 1977 , pp. 455–456)

Given this logic, conflicts between nuclear powers should reveal different escalatory patterns than conflicts between states where only one side possesses nuclear arms, or conflicts where neither side possesses nuclear arms. Specifically, disputes between nuclear powers should evidence a greater tendency to escalate—short of war—than nonnuclear disputes or disputes, in which only one side possesses a nuclear capability.

Kugler ( 1984 ) presents an empirical test of classical nuclear deterrence theory: the study examines whether nuclear weapons are salient in preventing the initiation or escalation of war to extreme levels. The analysis focuses on crisis interactions involving the United States, the Soviet Union, and China (PRC) with the case set drawn from Butterworth ( 1976 ) and CACI (Mahoney & Clayberg, 1978 , 1979 ). The cases used in the analysis constitute 14 extreme crises where nuclear nations were involved and where nuclear weapons “played a central role” (Kugler, 1984 , p. 477). The results indicate that crises of extreme intensity diminish as the threat of nuclear devastation becomes mutual. In other words, as the capacity of actors to destroy each other with nuclear weapons increases, there is a tendency to decrease the intensity of conflict, and to settle those crises that reach extreme proportions by compromise. This suggests that deterrence of war through the symmetric possession of nuclear weapons is operative in the conflict dynamics of great-power crises.

As Siverson and Miller ( 1993 , pp. 86–87) note, the earliest systematic statistical work on the effect of nuclear weapons possession in the escalation of conflict is by Geller ( 1990 ). This study employs the Correlates of War (COW) Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data covering 393 MIDs between 1946 and 1976 and uses the MID five-level dispute hostility index in coding the dependent variable. The results indicate that dispute escalation probabilities are significantly affected by the distribution of nuclear capabilities. Comparing the escalatory behavior of nuclear dyads with the escalatory behavior of nonnuclear dyads in militarized disputes, it is reported that symmetric nuclear disputes indicate a far greater tendency to escalate—short of war—than do disputes for nonnuclear pairs: disputes in which both parties possess nuclear weapons have approximately a seven times greater probability (0.238) of escalating of escalating than do disputes in which neither party possesses nuclear arms (0.032). The conclusion indicates that the presence of nuclear weapons impacts the crisis behavior of states, with disputes between nuclear states more likely to escalate, short of war, than disputes between nonnuclear nations.

Huth, Gelpi, and Bennett ( 1993 ) analyze 97 cases of great power deterrence encounters from 1816 to 1984 as a means of testing the explanatory power of two competing theoretical approaches to dispute escalation. Dispute escalation is defined as the failure of the deterrent policies of the defender. Deterrence failure occurs when the confrontation ends in either the large-scale use of force or defender capitulation to the challenger’s demands. For the post- 1945 period, the findings indicate that, for nuclear dyads, the possession of a nuclear second-strike capability by the defender substantially reduces the likelihood of the confrontation ending either in war or in capitulation by the defender. However, the possession of nuclear weapons in great power dyads does not deter the challenger from initiating militarized disputes.

Asal and Beardsley ( 2007 ) examine the relationship between the severity of violence in crises and the number of states involved in the confrontations that possess nuclear weapons. Using data from the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project, the study includes 434 international crises extending from 1918 through 2001 . The results indicate that symmetric nuclear dyads engage in an unexpectedly large number of crises—and that “crises involving nuclear actors are more likely to end without violence. . . [A]s the number of nuclear actors increases, the likelihood of war continues to fall” (Asal & Beardsley, 2007 , p. 140). The authors also note that their results indicate that there may be competing effects within nuclear dyads: specifically, that both sides will avoid war but engage in sub-war levels of escalatory behavior (Asal & Beardsley 2007 , p. 150, fn. 6).

Rauchhaus ( 2009 ) also attempts to test the effects of nuclear weapons possession on conflict behavior. The data are generated using the EUGene (v.3.203) statistical package for dyad years from 1885 through 2000 and for a subset period from 1946 through 2000 . 11 The findings indicate that, in militarized disputes, symmetric nuclear dyads have a lower probability of war than do dyads where only one nation possesses nuclear arms. Moreover, in dyads where there are nuclear weapons available on both sides (nuclear pairs), the findings indicate that disputes are associated with higher probabilities of crises and the use of force (below the level of war). The author suggests that the results support the implications of Snyder’s ( 1965 ) stability-instability paradox. The results are also supportive of the Snyder and Diesing ( 1977 ) contention that crises have become surrogates for war between nuclear-armed states where the manipulation of risk through coercive tactics is employed to secure political objectives.

A study by Kroenig ( 2013 ) provides similar results. Using an original data set of 52 nuclear crisis dyads drawn from the International Crisis Behavior Project for the years 1945 through 2001 , Kroenig codes the outcomes of nuclear crises against nuclear arsenal size and delivery vehicles, and the balance of political stakes in the crisis. He concludes “. . . that nuclear crises are competitions in risk taking, but that nuclear superiority—defined as an advantage in the size of a state’s nuclear arsenal relative to that of its opponent—increases the level of risk that a state is willing to run” (Kroenig, 2013 , p. 143), and hence its probability of winning the dispute without violence. These results support the contention that crises between nuclear-armed states tend to involve dangerous tactics of brinkmanship and tests of resolve.

Evidence consistent with the risk manipulation, escalation, and limited war thesis would include the presence of severe crises between nuclear powers that exhibit escalatory behavior short of unconstrained war but inclusive of the use of force. The limited conventional war of 1999 between India and Pakistan, initiated and carried out by Pakistan under the umbrella of its nuclear deterrent, is an extreme example of precisely this type of conflict interaction. It captures the logic of Snyder’s stability-instability paradox and incorporates, as well, descriptions by Schelling and by Kahn of the use of limited war (with the risk of greater violence to follow) as a means of persuading an adversary to relinquish a contested value.

Beardsley and Asal ( 2009a ) report that symmetric nuclear dyads engage in an unexpectedly large number of crises—a finding that is consistent with the Snyder and Diesing ( 1977 ) contention that crises have become surrogates for war among nuclear-armed states. Similarly, Huth, Bennett, and Gelpi ( 1992 ) note that, in great-power dyads, the possession of nuclear weapons by the defender does not deter dispute initiation by a nuclear-armed challenger, and that an outcome of either war or capitulation by the defender is unlikely. In findings not inconsistent with those of Huth et al., ( 1992 ), Kugler ( 1984 ) reports that (between 1946 and 1981 ), as the capacity of nuclear actors to destroy each other increases, there is a tendency to decrease the intensity of the conflict. Both Geller ( 1990 ) and Rauchhaus ( 2009 ), in large-scale quantitative empirical analyses of escalation patterns in nuclear, nonnuclear, and mixed (asymmetric) dyads, report that symmetric nuclear dyads are substantially more likely to escalate dispute hostility levels—short of war—than are nonnuclear pairs of states. In Geller’s study, the findings indicate that disputes in which both parties possessed nuclear weapons had approximately a seven times greater probability of escalation (0.238) than did disputes in which neither party possessed nuclear arms (0.032). Last, Kroenig ( 2013 ) demonstrates that confrontations between nuclear-armed states may be understood as competitions in risk taking and that an advantage in the size of one’s nuclear arsenal is associated with increased levels of risk acceptance and, hence, successful coercion.

These cumulative findings are strongly supportive of the risk manipulation, escalation, and limited war thesis on the effects of symmetric nuclear weapons possession. 12 Moreover, the case of the 1999 limited conventional war between India and Pakistan reflects both the logic of this school of thought as well as the patterns of escalation described in the large-scale quantitative studies of militarized disputes between nuclear-armed states.

Nuclear Irrelevance

The views of John Mueller are most commonly associated with the thesis of “nuclear irrelevance.” Mueller ( 1988 , 1989 ) makes the highly controversial argument that nuclear weapons neither defined the stability of the post-Second World War U.S.-Soviet relationship nor prevented a war between the superpowers; he also maintains that the weapons did not determine alliance patterns or induce caution in U.S.-Soviet crisis behavior. His contention is that the postwar world would have developed in the same manner even if nuclear weapons did not exist.

Mueller’s logic allows that a nuclear war would be catastrophic, but that nuclear weapons simply reinforced a military reality that had been made all too clear by World War II: even conventional war between great powers is too destructive to serve any conceivable political purpose. Moreover, the satisfaction with the status quo shared by the United States and the Soviet Union removed any desire for territorial conquest that might have led to conflict, as each superpower held dominance in its respective sphere of influence. Similarly, provocative crisis behavior was restrained by the fear of escalation—and although the presence of nuclear weapons may have embellished such caution, the mere possibility of fighting another conventional war such as World War II would have induced fear and restraint on the part of decision makers. In short, nuclear weapons may have enhanced Cold War stability, but their absence would not have produced a different world. Mueller closes his argument with the extrapolation that war among developed nations is obsolescent. It may simply be that, in the developed world, a conviction has grown that war among post-industrial states “would be intolerably costly, unwise, futile, and debased” (Mueller, 1988 , p. 78). In this sense, nuclear weapons lack deterrent value among developed states because—absent the incentive for war—there is nothing to deter.

In a related thesis, Vasquez ( 1991 ) holds that it is unlikely—given what is known about the complex conjunction of multiple factors in the steps to war—that any single factor, such as the availability of nuclear weapons, causes or prevents wars. He makes the nuanced argument, in discussing the long post-war peace between the United States and the Soviet Union, that:

There is little evidence to support the claim that nuclear deterrence has prevented nuclear war or that it could do so in the future, if severely tested . . . Nuclear war may have been prevented not because of deterrence, but because those factors pushing the United States and the USSR toward war have not been sufficiently great to override the risks and costs of total war (Vasquez, 1991 , p. 207, 214).

Of principal significance to Vasquez is the absence of a direct territorial dispute between the superpowers. Other factors that Vasquez believes contributed to the long peace include satisfaction with the status quo, the experience of the two world wars, the establishment of rules and norms of interaction between the superpowers, procedures for crisis management, and effective arms control regimes. 13

A second area of application for the nuclear irrelevancy thesis involves asymmetric dyads. Little has been written about the effects of nuclear weapons on the patterns of serious disputes where this technology is possessed by only one side. However, what has been written suggests that in these types of conflicts nuclear weaponry may lack both military and psychological salience. For example, Osgood and Tucker ( 1967 , p. 158) and Blainey ( 1973 , p. 201) argue that tactical nuclear weapons are largely devoid of military significance in either Third World conflicts or insurgencies, where suitable targets for the weapons are absent. An additional disincentive to the use of nuclear weapons against a nonnuclear opponent is that it might be expected to increase the pressures for nuclear proliferation and to incite international criticism and denunciation of the nuclear state (Huth, 1988a , p. 428). It also has been suggested that a sense of fairness or proportionality contributes a moral aspect to the practical military and political inhibitions on using nuclear weapons against a nonnuclear opponent and that the set of these concerns has undermined the efficacy of nuclear power as a deterrent in asymmetric conflicts (Huth & Russett, 1988 , p. 38; Russett, 1989 , p. 184).

Moreover, Waltz ( 1967 , p. 222) and Osgood and Tucker ( 1967 , pp. 162–163) caution against exaggerating the differences due to nuclear weapons between contemporary and historical major power-minor power conflicts. Long before the advent of nuclear weapons, minor powers frequently defied or withstood great power pressure as a result of circumstances of geography, alliance, or an intensity of interests that the major power could not match.

In a similar argument, Jervis ( 1984 , p. 132) examines the logic of escalation in a losing cause (presumably a tactic relating directly to disputes between nuclear and nonnuclear states) and suggests that a threat to fight a war that almost certainly would be lost may not be without credibility—indeed, there may be compelling reasons for actually engaging in such a conflict. Specifically, if the cost of winning the war is higher to the major power than is the value at stake in the dispute, then the confrontation embodies the game structure of “Chicken.” Hence, even if war is more damaging to the minor power than to the major power, the stronger may still prefer capitulation or a compromise solution to the confrontation rather than engaging in the fight. In sum, Jervis ( 1984 , p. 135) argues that: “the ability to tolerate and raise the level of risk is not closely tied to military superiority . . . The links between military power—both local and global—and states' behavior in crises are thus tenuous.”

The third area of application for the nuclear irrelevancy thesis involves policies of extended deterrence. The efficacy of nuclear weapons for the purposes of extended deterrence was an issue of immense importance throughout the Cold War. In fact, the positions on whether American strategic nuclear weapons were sufficient to deter a Soviet-Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe or whether substantial conventional and tactical nuclear weapons were necessary for successful deterrence constituted a continuing debate for decades. Nuclear revolution theory contended that the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal (with its ability to destroy the Soviet Union) was sufficient to induce caution and restraint on the part of the Soviet leadership. However, the strategists who formulated the stability-instability paradox argued that U.S. strategic nuclear weapons would deter a direct nuclear strike on the United States itself, but little else. According to this logic, for the successful extended deterrence of an attack on Europe, the United States and NATO required effective combat forces that could fight at the level of conventional war and even war with tactical nuclear weapons. Escalation dominance was required to sustain extended deterrence. Of course, extended deterrence policies existed long before the development of nuclear weapons and applied to any situation where a powerful defender attempted to deter an attack against an ally by threat of military response. The issue at hand is the effectiveness of a strategic nuclear threat in sustaining a successful extended deterrence policy. The nuclear irrelevancy position is that such weapons lack significance in extended deterrence situations.

In sum, the nuclear irrelevance thesis suggests that nuclear weapons have little salience in the interaction patterns of nuclear-armed dyads. Evidence consistent with this position would indicate that, for symmetric dyads, the possession of nuclear weapons or the nuclear balance does not affect crisis escalation, crisis outcomes, or dispute initiation patterns. In addition, if a set of practical, political, and ethical constraints has weakened the military advantage of possessing nuclear weapons in a serious dispute with a nonnuclear state, then the monopolization of a nuclear capability will not confer a bargaining edge to the nuclear-armed state in an asymmetric crisis. The nuclear irrelevance school would also gain support in findings indicating the absence of substantive effects resulting from possession of nuclear weapons in extended deterrence situations.

In evaluating the empirical evidence regarding the nuclear irrelevance thesis, it is useful analytically to separate the studies into distinct categories: (a) findings involving the effects of nuclear weapons in nuclear-armed dyads; (b) findings involving the interaction patterns of nuclear-armed states against nonnuclear opponents; and (c) findings bearing on extended deterrence situations.

(a) Nuclear dyads . The examination of evidence relating to nuclear revolution theory upheld the prediction that, as the theory suggests, war between nuclear-armed states should be nonexistent or a very rare event (e.g., Asal & Beardsley, 2007 ; Bueno de Mesquita & Riker, 1982 ; Rauchhaus, 2009 ). The success of this prediction (with the exception of the 1999 Kargil War) serves as the principal finding in support of the nuclear revolution thesis. However, this finding holds negative implications for the validity of the nuclear irrelevancy thesis. In other findings counter to the patterns hypothesized by the nuclear irrelevancy thesis, Geller ( 1990 ) reports results that indicate that the distribution of nuclear capabilities affects the patterns of escalation in militarized interstate disputes, and that symmetric nuclear dyads show substantially higher dispute escalation probabilities, short of war, than do nonnuclear dyads. Rauchhaus’s ( 2009 ) findings mirror Geller’s. Similarly, Beardsley and Asal ( 2009a ) note that the crisis behavior of symmetric nuclear dyads differs from that of asymmetric dyads. Only the work of Bell and Miller ( 2015 ) stands in opposition to this general pattern. Using data from Rauchhaus ( 2009 ), Bell and Miller ( 2015 , p. 83) contend that nuclear dyads do not exhibit conflict patterns distinct from nonnuclear dyads either in terms of war or sub-war militarized disputes.

However, other evidence relating to conflict behavior, crisis interaction patterns, or crisis outcomes that indicate that nuclear weapons were inconsequential in the disputes would support the contention that nuclear forces are irrelevant in symmetric dyads. For example, Blechman and Kaplan ( 1978 ) provide an empirical analysis of 215 incidents between 1946 and 1975 , in which the United States used its armed forces for political objectives. Their findings indicate that the strategic nuclear weapons balance between the United States and the Soviet Union did not influence the outcome of competitive incidents involving the two states (Blechman & Kaplan, 1978 , pp. 127–129). Instead, the authors maintain that the local balance of conventional military power was more important in determining the outcomes of the confrontations (Blechman & Kaplan, 1978 , p. 527).

Kugler ( 1984 ) presents an empirical test of nuclear deterrence theory by examining whether nuclear weapons are efficacious in preventing the initiation or escalation of crises to the level of war. The case set is 14 extreme crises between 1946 and 1981 involving the United States, the Soviet Union, and China. Of the 14 crises, five involved nuclear-armed dyads (a nuclear power on each side). He concludes that: “nuclear nations do not have an obvious and direct advantage over other nuclear . . . nations in extreme crises. Rather, conventional [military] capabilities are the best predictor of outcome of extreme crises regardless of their severity” (Kugler, 1984 , p.501).

In contrast to the findings by Blechman and Kaplan ( 1978 ) and Kugler ( 1984 ), a study by Kroenig ( 2013 ) provides different results. Using a data set of 52 nuclear crisis dyads ( 1945–2001 ) drawn from the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project, Kroenig codes the outcomes of nuclear crises, nuclear arsenal size and delivery vehicles, and the balance of political stakes in the crisis. He concludes that nuclear superiority—defined as an advantage in the size of a state’s nuclear arsenal relative to that of its opponent—increases the level of risk that a state is willing to run and hence its probability of winning the dispute without violence (Kroenig, 2013 , p. 143).

Huth et al. ( 1992 ) examine militarized dispute-initiation patterns among great power rivalries between 1816 and 1975 as a means of testing a set of explanatory variables drawn from multiple levels of analysis. The principal focus of the study is to investigate the relationship between the structure of the international system and the initiation of great power disputes. However, the analysis does include a variable coded for the possession of nuclear weapons by the challenger’s rival. The findings indicate that the presence of defenders’ nuclear weapons does not deter challengers from initiating militarized disputes among great powers (Huth et al., 1992 , p. 478, 513).

Gartzke and Jo ( 2009 ) examine the effects of nuclear weapons possession on patterns of militarized dispute initiation using a sophisticated multivariate model and data drawn from the COW/MID database for directed dyads over the years 1946 through 2001 . Their findings indicate that nuclear weapons possession has little effect on dispute initiation behavior. The authors note that: “Instead, countries with security problems, greater interest in international affairs, or significant military capabilities are simultaneously more likely to fight and proliferate” (Gartzke & Jo, 2009 , p. 221). The relationship between nuclear weapons and MID initiation is rejected statistically: this finding applies to both symmetric (nuclear) and asymmetric (nuclear/nonnuclear) dyads.

(b) Asymmetric dyads . The nuclear irrelevancy school also maintains that the possession of nuclear weapons confers no bargaining advantage on the nuclear-armed power engaged in a confrontation with a nonnuclear state.

In a seminal study examining the effects of nuclear weapons on conflict interaction patterns, Organski and Kugler ( 1980 , pp. 163–164) identify 14 deterrence cases that occurred between 1945 and 1979 in which nuclear weapons could have been used. Seven of these cases involved a nuclear power in confrontation with a nonnuclear state (or a state with an ineffective nuclear force ). Their findings indicate that in only one case out of the seven did the nuclear-armed state win: “Nonnuclear powers defied, attacked, and defeated nuclear powers and got away with it” (Organski & Kugler, 1980 , p. 176). In the six cases that the nuclear power lost to a nonnuclear state, the winner was estimated to have conventional military superiority at the site of the confrontation (Organski & Kugler, 1980 , p. 177).

In a related study, Kugler ( 1984 ) isolates 14 cases of extreme crisis that occurred between 1946 and 1981 , in which nuclear weapons were available to at least one party in the dispute. Of these 14 cases, nine involved confrontations in which only one state had access to nuclear arms. In all nine cases, the outcomes of the crises favored the nonnuclear challenger. Once again, the balance of conventional military capabilities—not nuclear weaponry—provided the best predictor of crisis outcome (Kugler, 1984 , p. 501).

In an early large-scale study, Geller ( 1990 ) examines conflict escalation patterns in serious interstate disputes among nations with both symmetric and asymmetric types of weapons technology. This study employs the Correlates of War (COW) Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data, inclusive of 393 MIDs between 1946 and 1976 , and uses the MID five-level dispute hostility index in coding the dependent variable. The findings indicate that, for asymmetric dyads (with only one state in possession of nuclear arms), the availability of nuclear force has no evident inhibitory effect on the escalation propensities of nonnuclear opponents. In fact, the findings show that in this class of confrontation, both nonnuclear dispute initiators and targets act more aggressively than do their nuclear-armed opponents. The summation suggests that in confrontations between nuclear and nonnuclear states, war is a distinct possibility, with aggressive escalation by the nonnuclear power probable. In such cases, it is concluded that the conventional military balance may be determinative of the outcome (Geller, 1990 , p. 307).

In two studies published in 1994 and 1995 , Paul employs the case study method to examine the dynamics of asymmetric war initiation by weaker powers. Paul ( 1994 ) analyzes six cases of war initiation by weaker states against stronger states: three of these cases (China/U.S. in 1950 ; Egypt/Israel in 1973 ; and Argentina/Great Britain in 1982 ) involve nonnuclear nations initiating wars against nuclear-armed opponents. Paul ( 1994 , p. 173) concludes that nuclear weapons appear to have limited utility in averting war in asymmetric dyads. He notes that, with either nuclear or conventional weapons, a significant military advantage may be insufficient to deter a weaker state that is highly motivated to change the status quo. In a more focused study, Paul ( 1995 ) discusses the possible reasons underlying the nonuse of nuclear weapons by nuclear-armed states against nonnuclear opponents. Here he analyzes two cases (Argentina/Great Britain in the Falklands War of 1982 and Egypt/Israel in the Middle East War of 1973 ) in which nonnuclear states initiated wars against nuclear opponents. Paul argues that in both cases nuclear retaliation by the targets was deemed highly improbable by the nonnuclear war initiators due to a combination of limited war goals and taboos (unwritten and uncodified prohibitionary norms) against the use of nuclear weapons.

Rauchhaus ( 2009 ) attempts to test the effects of nuclear weapons possession on conflict behavior for asymmetric as well as for symmetric dyads using data generated by the EUGene (v.3.203) statistical program for dyad years from 1885 through 2000 . The findings indicate that, for asymmetric (nuclear/nonnuclear) dyads (in comparison to symmetric dyads), there is a higher probability of war. Asymmetric dyads are also more likely to be involved in militarized disputes that reach the level of the use of force (Rauchhaus, 2009 , pp. 269–270). In short, the study produces results that hold in opposition to the view that conflict between nuclear and nonnuclear states will be limited. As Rauchhaus ( 2009 , p. 271) concludes: “nuclear asymmetry is generally associated with a higher chance of crises, uses of force, fatalities, and war.”

A study by Beardsley and Asal ( 2009b ) produces findings that stand in counterpoint to the main body of analyses on conflict in asymmetric dyads. This work examines the question of whether the possession of nuclear weapons affects the probability of prevailing in a crisis. The data are drawn from the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project for directed dyads covering the years between 1945 and 2002 . The findings indicate that the possession of nuclear weapons provides bargaining leverage against nonnuclear opponents in crises: nuclear actors are more likely to prevail when facing a nonnuclear state (Beardsley & Asal, 2009b , p. 278, 289).

However, with regard to bargaining advantages that may be derived from the possession of nuclear weapons, Sechser and Fuhrmann ( 2013 ) argue (counter to Beardsley & Asal) that compellent threats based on nuclear force may lack credibility due to their indiscriminately destructive effects and the reputational costs that, presumably, would be associated with their use. Drawing on a new data set (Militarized Compellent Threats) containing 242 challenger-target dyads for the period 1918 to 2001 , they report findings indicating that “states possessing nuclear weapons are not more likely to make successful compellent threats [than nonnuclear states] . . . and that nuclear weapons carry little weight as tools of compellence” (Sechser & Fuhrmann, 2013 , p. 174).

An interesting corollary finding is presented by Narang ( 2013 ). Using data collected by Bennett and Stam ( 2004 ) to explore the conflict behavior of regional (non-superpower) nuclear actors from 1945 through 2001 , Narang finds little evidence supporting an existential deterrent effect for nuclear weapons against nonnuclear opponents. Rather, he concludes that the nuclear posture adopted by the nuclear-armed state is determinative of deterrence success, with an “asymmetric escalation” posture superior to either a “catalytic” or “assured destruction” posture in deterring conventional attacks with military force (Narang, 2013 , p. 280, 284–286).

(c) Extended deterrence . The logic of the nuclear irrelevancy thesis suggests that nuclear weapons should be of little salience in extended deterrence situations.

Huth defines deterrence as a policy that seeks to convince an adversary through threat of military retaliation that the costs of using military force outweigh any expected benefits. Extended deterrence is then defined by Huth ( 1988a , p. 424) as a confrontation between a defender and a potential attacker in which the defender threatens the use of military force against the potential attacker’s use of force against an ally (protégé) of the defender. There have been a large number of studies produced on the issue of the efficacy of extended nuclear deterrence—the majority of which report a body of consistent or complementary findings.

As noted in Harvey and James ( 1992 ), Bruce Russett’s ( 1963 ) analysis of 17 crises that occurred between 1935 and 1961 appears to be the first aggregate study of the factors associated with extended deterrence success and failure. Nine crisis cases involved defenders with a nuclear capability, and six of the nine cases resulted in successful extended deterrence. However, Russett draws no conclusions as to the independent effect of nuclear weapons on those outcomes. He does note that military equality on either the local (conventional) or strategic (nuclear) level appears to be a necessary condition for extended deterrence success.

Two studies published by Weede ( 1981 , 1983 ) also deal with the effectiveness of extended nuclear deterrence. Weede examines 299 dyads between 1962 and 1980 for evidence relating to patterns of extended deterrence success or failure. His findings are supportive of the position that nuclear weapons assist in producing extended deterrence success.

In a subsequent study, Huth and Russett ( 1984 ) increased the size of Russett’s ( 1963 ) sample set from 17 to 54 historical cases of extended deterrence from 1900 through 1980 . The findings indicate that the effect of nuclear weapons on extended deterrence success or failure is marginal. Of much greater import are the combined local conventional military capabilities of the defender and protégé; hence, conventional, rather than nuclear, combat power is associated with the probability of extended deterrence success.

In two related studies, Huth ( 1988a , 1988b ) examines 58 historical cases of extended deterrence and reports findings similar to those found in Huth and Russett ( 1984 ). Specifically, the possession of nuclear weapons by the defender did not have a statistically significant effect on deterrence outcomes when the target itself was a nonnuclear power. In addition, the ability of the defender to deny the potential attacker a quick and decisive conventional military victory on the battlefield was correlated with extended deterrence success.

Huth and Russett ( 1988 ) present an analysis of Huth’s ( 1988b ) 58 historical cases of extended deterrence success and failure. In this database, there were 16 cases of extended deterrence crises where defenders possessed nuclear weapons. The findings indicate that a defender’s nuclear capability was essentially irrelevant to extended deterrence outcomes; existing and locally superior conventional military forces were of much greater importance to deterrence success.

Huth ( 1990 ) produced another study based on the data set described in his 1988b book. In this study, he examines the effects of the possession of nuclear weapons by a defender only in extended deterrent crises not characterized by mutual assured destruction (i.e., where the potential attacker either does not possess nuclear weapons or does not possess a significant nuclear capability). He reports that, when the defender has an advantage in conventional forces, nuclear weapons do not play a significant role in the outcomes of extended deterrence confrontations (Huth, 1990 , p. 271).

In an unusual work, Carlson ( 1998 ) combines a formal mathematical model with an empirical test of escalation in extended deterrence crises. Using Huth’s ( 1988b ) data extending from 1885 to 1983 , the analysis examines the 58 cases of extended deterrence crises. Measures include the estimated cost-tolerance of both attackers and defenders. The findings indicate that low cost-tolerance challengers are less likely to escalate a crisis to higher levels of hostility when the defender possesses nuclear weapons.

Fuhrmann and Sechser ( 2014 ) report findings similar to those of Weede ( 1981 , 1983 ) and Carlson ( 1998 ), insofar as the independent extended deterrent effect of nuclear weapons is supported. Using Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data for the years 1950 through 2000 , and controlling for the effects of contiguity, polity-type of challenger, power ratio, and nuclear status of challenger, they conclude that “formal defense pacts with nuclear states have significant deterrence benefits. Having a nuclear-armed ally is strongly associated with a lower likelihood of being targeted in a violent militarized dispute . . .” (Fuhrmann & Sechser, 2014 , p. 920).

The empirical evidence regarding the nuclear irrelevance thesis has been divided analytically into three distinct categories: (a) findings involving the effect of nuclear weapons in nuclear dyads; (b) findings involving the interaction patterns of nuclear-armed states against nonnuclear opponents; and (c) findings relating to extended deterrence situations.

Regarding Category “a”—the effect of nuclear weapons on conflict patterns in nuclear dyads—the results are mixed. According to the logic of the nuclear irrelevancy thesis, nuclear-armed dyads should show identical conflict patterns to nonnuclear dyads. This prediction is supported by the findings of Bell and Miller ( 2015 ). However, Asal and Beardsley ( 2007 ), Bueno de Mesquita and Riker ( 1982 ), and Rauchhaus ( 2009 ) all note that empirical probabilities of war are far lower for nuclear dyads than for nonnuclear dyads. Moreover, Geller ( 1990 ) reports results indicating that the distribution of nuclear capabilities affects escalation patterns in militarized interstate disputes, and that symmetric nuclear dyads show substantially higher dispute escalation probabilities—short of war—than do nonnuclear dyads. Rauchhaus’s ( 2009 ) findings are identical to Geller’s. Similarly, Beardsley and Asal ( 2009a ) note that the crisis behavior of symmetric nuclear dyads differs from that of asymmetric dyads. In sum, contrary to the predictions of the nuclear irrelevancy school, these findings suggest that patterns of war and crisis escalation differ among symmetric nuclear dyads, asymmetric dyads, and nonnuclear dyads.

Nevertheless, there is a body of evidence for nuclear dyads that supports the nuclear irrelevancy thesis; these findings focus on the effects of the nuclear balance on crisis outcomes and the effect of nuclear weapons on patterns of dispute initiation. Both Blechman and Kaplan ( 1978 ; with 215 incidents from 1946 to 1975 ) and Kugler ( 1984 ; five extreme crises between 1946 and 1981 ), report that the balance of nuclear forces in nuclear dyads was less significant in influencing the outcome of confrontations than was the local balance of conventional military capabilities. Only Kroenig’s ( 2013 ) work indicates a crisis bargaining advantage accruing to a state with nuclear superiority in symmetric nuclear dyads. With regard to dispute initiation, Huth et al. ( 1992 ) report a lack of salience regarding the availability of nuclear weapons for great powers and the initiation patterns of their militarized disputes. Gartzke and Jo ( 2009 ) similarly note that nuclear weapons show no statistically significant relationship to the initiation of militarized interstate disputes in either symmetric or asymmetric dyads. In sum, the findings of this subset of studies are consistent with the thrust of the nuclear irrelevancy thesis regarding both the effects of the nuclear balance on crisis outcomes and the effects of the availability of nuclear weapons on dispute initiation patterns.

Category “b”—focusing on the interaction patterns of nuclear-armed states against nonnuclear opponents—provides a second set of cumulative findings. Organski and Kugler ( 1980 ), Kugler ( 1984 ), Geller ( 1990 ), and Rauchhaus ( 2009 ) all conclude that the possession of nuclear weapons provides little leverage in the conflict patterns or outcomes of disputes in asymmetric dyads. Organski and Kugler ( 1980 ) note that, in six cases out of seven, nonnuclear states achieved their objectives in confrontations with nuclear-armed states. Kugler ( 1984 ) reports that in nine crises between nuclear and nonnuclear states, the outcomes in every case favored the nonnuclear party. In both studies, conventional military capabilities at the site of the confrontation provided the best predictor of crisis outcome.

Geller’s ( 1990 ) analysis indicates that in 34 asymmetric disputes with a nuclear initiator, the nonnuclear target matched or escalated the initiator’s hostility level in 24 cases (71%); in 56 asymmetric disputes with a nonnuclear initiator, the nuclear target deescalated the crisis by failing to match or exceed the nonnuclear initiator’s hostility level in 35 cases (63%). Moreover, 35 of the total of 90 cases (39%) of asymmetric disputes reached the level in which force was used. These findings show that in this class of dyad, nonnuclear dispute initiators as well as targets act more aggressively than do their nuclear-armed opponents. The conclusion suggests that in confrontations between nuclear and nonnuclear states, the use of force, including war, is a distinct possibility, with aggressive escalation by the nonnuclear state probable. In such cases of asymmetric distribution of nuclear forces, the conventional military balance may well be the determinative factor in the outcome of the dispute.

The findings of Rauchhaus ( 2009 ) reinforce those discussed above: there is a higher probability of war in asymmetric dyads than in symmetric nuclear dyads, and asymmetric dyads are more likely than symmetric nuclear dyads to experience militarized disputes that engage the use of force. As Rauchhaus concludes, nuclear asymmetry is associated with higher probabilities of crises, limited use of force, and war, than are symmetric nuclear dyads.

A study by Narang ( 2013 ) offers corollary evidence that the deterrent effect of the possession of nuclear weapons (for regional nuclear powers engaged in disputes with nonnuclear states) depends heavily on the nuclear posture that is adopted. Specifically, in contrast to catalytic or assured destruction postures, only an asymmetric escalation posture has any effect in deterring conventional military assaults. Last, Sechser and Fuhrmann ( 2013 ) report findings indicating that, although nuclear weapons may provide deterrent value, they are irrelevant as instruments of compellence.

These results are generally consistent with the predictions of the nuclear irrelevance thesis regarding conflict patterns in asymmetric dyads: the possession of nuclear weapons confers little or no advantage to nuclear-armed states in disputes with nonnuclear opponents. Paul’s ( 1994 , 1995 ) case studies of instances of war initiation by nonnuclear states against nuclear-armed adversaries offer additional evidence in conformity with this pattern.

In sum, the findings of this subset of studies are supportive of the thrust of the nuclear irrelevance thesis regarding both the effects of the nuclear balance on crisis outcomes and the effects of nuclear weapons possession on dispute initiation patterns: the possession of nuclear weapons does not impede aggressive behavior by nonnuclear states.

Category “c”—extended deterrence crises—also provides a pattern of results. Studies by Huth and Russett ( 1984 , 1988 ), and Huth ( 1988a , 1988b , 1990 ) report the essential irrelevance of a defender’s possession of nuclear weapons to extended deterrence success. These studies indicate that existing and locally superior conventional military force is the factor most frequently associated with the majority of successful extended deterrence outcomes. Russett ( 1963 ) notes the ambiguous effects of a nuclear capability in situations of extended deterrence and concludes that military equality on either the conventional or nuclear level appears to be minimally requisite for extended deterrence success. However, Weede ( 1981 , 1983 ), Carlson ( 1998 ), and Fuhrmann and Sechser ( 2014 ) report evidence contrary to the general set of findings: specifically, that nuclear weapons assist in producing successful outcomes in extended deterrence situations.

In sum, the cumulative findings in all three areas are consistent with some of the predictions of the nuclear irrelevance school and inconsistent with others. For symmetric nuclear dyads, a substantial set of findings indicates that patterns of war and crisis escalation differ between symmetric nuclear dyads, asymmetric dyads, and nonnuclear dyads. Counter to the predictions of the nuclear irrelevancy thesis, nuclear weapons affect the nature of conflict interaction between nuclear-armed states. At the same time, there is a subset of findings consistent with the predictions of nuclear irrelevancy for nuclear dyads: the nuclear balance does not affect the outcome of crises (the balance of local conventional military forces is more important), nor does the symmetric possession of nuclear weapons distinguish initiation patterns of militarized disputes from initiation patterns in asymmetric or nonnuclear disputes. Also supportive of the irrelevancy thesis are findings indicating that, for asymmetric dyads, the possession of nuclear arms provides scant advantage in crises and confrontations with nonnuclear states. Escalation by the nonnuclear adversary and its use of force—including war—are outcomes with surprisingly high probabilities. Last, in extended deterrence situations, the cumulative findings tend toward the essential irrelevance of nuclear weapons possession and point instead toward the salience of the local balance of conventional military forces in determining crisis outcomes.

This article has reviewed the three principal schools of thought regarding the effects of nuclear weapons possession on patterns of international conflict: (a) nuclear revolution theory; (b) risk manipulation, escalation, and limited war; and (c) nuclear irrelevance. Quantitative empirical works that produced findings relevant to evaluating the predictions of these schools were then collated by category and their results compared to the predictions.

For nuclear revolution theory, the findings offer limited, but not insignificant, support. For example, as predicted, wars among nuclear-armed states have been rare events. To date, with the exception of India and Pakistan in 1999 , no other militarized dispute between nuclear powers has reached the level of war (based on Correlates of War Project coding rules). As Waltz and Jervis have predicted, wars occur among nuclear-armed states at a far lower proportional frequency than in asymmetric or nonnuclear dyads. However, the prediction of nuclear revolution theory—that there will be few crises among nuclear-armed powers—has not been supported by the quantitative empirical evidence. Similarly, the prediction that those crises that do develop among nuclear powers will be settled rapidly and without serious escalation has not found empirical support.

For the risk manipulation, escalation, and limited war school, the evidence has proved more uniformly favorable. The prediction by Snyder and Diesing ( 1977 ) that crises among nuclear-armed states will be used as surrogates for war—with associated tactics (including the limited use of force) designed to increase risk and intimidate through dangerous escalatory behaviors—has been largely supported. Comparisons of crisis escalation probabilities between symmetric nuclear dyads, asymmetric dyads, and nonnuclear dyads clearly show higher escalation probabilities for nuclear dyads than for the other two classes, with disputes for nuclear dyads approximately seven times more likely to escalate—short of war—than disputes for nonnuclear dyads. Moreover, the case of the 1999 war between India and Pakistan conforms to the logic of Snyder’s stability-instability paradox whereby limited war is fought between nuclear powers under the protective umbrellas of their nuclear deterrents.

The nuclear irrelevance school, like nuclear revolution theory, finds mixed support in the extant empirical evidence. The nuclear irrelevancy thesis can be categorized according to predictions involving (a) the effects of nuclear weapons in nuclear dyads, (b) the effects of nuclear weapons possession in asymmetric dyads, and (c) the effects of nuclear weapons in extended deterrence situations. Counter to the logic of this school, cumulative empirical evidence indicates that nuclear weapons do make a difference in certain types of conflict interaction. Patterns of war and crisis escalation differ between symmetric nuclear dyads, asymmetric dyads, and nonnuclear dyads, with nuclear dyads less likely to fight wars and more likely to exhibit crisis escalation patterns short of war than nonnuclear dyads.

Supportive of the contentions of the nuclear irrelevancy school are findings indicating that in asymmetric dyads, the possession of nuclear arms provides no discernable advantage in crises and confrontations. Escalation by the nonnuclear adversary and its use of force against its nuclear-armed opponent—including war—are distinct outcomes with surprisingly high probabilities. Lastly, in extended deterrence situations, the cumulative findings indicate the essential irrelevance of nuclear weapons possession and point instead toward the salience of the local balance of conventional military forces in determining outcomes.

Three conclusions may be drawn from the patterns discussed above.

Wars among nuclear-armed states are improbable. If confrontations do escalate to the level of violence, such violence will likely remain conventional. Hence, the spread of nuclear weapons increasingly supports the maintenance of the status quo.

Crises among nuclear powers have a higher probability of escalating—short of war—than do crises for asymmetric or nonnuclear dyads. It is apparent that symmetric nuclear dyads engage in dangerous tactics involving the manipulation of risk as a means of securing policy, objectives.

In asymmetric dyads the possession of nuclear weapons does not impede aggressive behavior by a nonnuclear adversary. Hence, the advantage in holding nuclear weaponry does not translate into bargaining leverage in confrontations between nuclear states and their nonnuclear adversaries.

It is evident that the effects of nuclear weapons possession on patterns of international conflict are complex. Moreover, the patterns themselves may be subject to change as a result of events. For example, the future use of nuclear weapons in a war between nuclear-armed states or the use of such weapons in a war against a nonnuclear state might lead to different expectations of outcomes and thereby alter the subsequent strategic calculations and policy choices of decision makers. Unmistakably, nuclear weapons have raised the prompt and potential long-term costs of war. Empirical analysis has indicated in what way these weapons have affected the patterns of international conflict in the past. How these weapons may ultimately affect the future conflict patterns of states remains to be determined.

Acknowledgment

I wish to thank John Vasquez, Jack Levy, and Peter Wallensteen for their expert commentaries on an earlier version of this article. This article is an expanded and revised version of Daniel S. Geller (2012), Nuclear Weapons and War, in J. A. Vasquez (Ed.), What Do We Know About War? (2d ed.). Used by permission of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. All rights reserved.

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1. See Gartzke and Kroenig ( 2016 ) for an excellent review of this literature. Related studies that examine the determinants of nuclear proliferation include Meyer ( 1984 ), Sagan ( 1996/1997 ), Geller ( 2003 ), Singh and Way ( 2004 ), Hymans ( 2006 , 2012 ), Solingen ( 2007 , 2012 ), Jo and Gartzke ( 2007 ), Gartzke and Kroenig ( 2009 ), Kroenig ( 2009 , 2010 ), Fuhrmann ( 2009 ), Horowitz ( 2010 ), Bleek ( 2010 ), Bleek and Lorber ( 2014 ), Brown and Kaplow ( 2014 ), Miller ( 2014 ), Way and Weeks ( 2014 ), and Reiter ( 2014 ).

2. As Mueller ( 1988 , pp. 55–56) notes: “nuclear weapons neither define a fundamental stability nor threaten severely to disturb it. . . [W]hile nuclear weapons may have substantially influenced political rhetoric, public discourse, and defense budgets and planning, it is not at all clear that they have had a significant impact on the history of world affairs since World War II.”

3. Others attributing to nuclear weapons causal significance for the “long peace” between the United States and the Soviet Union include The Harvard Nuclear Study Group ( 1983 ), Tucker ( 1985 ), Quester ( 1986 ), Bundy ( 1988 ), and Gaddis ( 1991 ). However, Levy ( 1989 , pp. 289–295), while noting the stability in the superpower relationship produced by nuclear weapons, cautions about pressures for preemptive war that may develop between nuclear-armed states.

4. Intriligator and Brito ( 1981 ) present a similar formal mathematical analysis of the effects of nuclear proliferation on the probability of nuclear war—but in this case without associated empirical data. The mathematical model demonstrates that the effects of nuclear proliferation on the probability of nuclear war depend on the number of existing nuclear weapon states, and that proliferation may reduce rather than increase the probability of nuclear war. Once two or more states achieve a secure second-strike capability, the addition of new nuclear states decreases the incentive to initiate a nuclear war. However, Intriligator and Brito note that, while the probability of a calculated nuclear attack may decrease as a result of proliferation, there may be an increase in the probability of accidental or irrational nuclear war as these weapons spread throughout the system.

5. For a different interpretation of the 1999 Kargil War—by Waltz—see Sagan and Waltz ( 2003 , pp. 109–124). Also see Basrur ( 2007–2008 ) and Diehl, Goertz, and Saeedi ( 2005 ) for analyses suggesting, like Waltz, that caution was imposed in the conduct of the Kargil War by nuclear weapons. For a sophisticated model of the effects of various levels of nuclear war between India and Pakistan, see Batcher ( 2004 ).

6. Major works, many using formal mathematical models, that explore the factors associated with deterrence, brinkmanship and the manipulation of risk, crisis stability, threat credibility, and the consequences of nuclear proliferation include those by Ellsberg (1959[ 1968 ], 1960 ), Brams and Kilgour ( 1985 ), Powell ( 1987 , 1988 ), Kugler ( 1987 ), Nalebuff ( 1988 ), Langlois ( 1991 ), Wagner ( 1991 ), Carlson ( 1995 ), Brito and Intriligator ( 1996 ), Zagare and Kilgour ( 2000 ), Danilovic ( 2002 ), Morgan ( 1977 , 2003 ), and Zagare ( 2007 ).

7. For example, see Bundy and Blight ( 1987–1988 , pp. 30–92). Glaser and Fetter ( 2016 ), in a sophisticated analysis of potential United States damage-limitation strategies and forces vis-à-vis China, conclude that such an effort would most likely fail and would undermine a stable deterrence relationship. Indeed, Mueller ( 1988 , 1989 ) presents an argument that, among developed countries, major war (nuclear or conventional) is no longer considered a realistic foreign policy option due to the massive destructive effects. But Mueller ( 1988 , p. 56) also contends that nuclear weapons have not fundamentally affected the crisis behavior of major powers. For a response to this argument, see Jervis ( 1988 ).

8. Escalation theory is a subset of the more general body of theory on strategic interaction in international politics (e.g., Singer, 1963 ).

9. Strategic theorists fully recognize, however, that escalation of conflict can occur irrespective of the desires of the participants due to factors of miscalculation or momentum. This possibility—and an appreciation of it—forms a key element in the work of some theorists in this school (e.g., Schelling, 1966 , ch. 3).

10. Other early works with sections on escalation that touch on the subject of risk are Kahn ( 1962 , ch. 6), Snyder ( 1961 , pp. 252–258), Schelling ( 1966 , pp. 99–116, 166–168), Schelling ( 1960 , appendix A), and Halperin ( 1963 , chs. 1–2, 4). The issue of “costly signals” with regard to the credibility of threats and commitments are elaborations on the themes of these early studies on escalation (e.g., Fearon, 1994a , 1994b , 1997 ; Schultz, 1998 ). For example, Fearon ( 1997 , p. 82) discusses the relative merits of the “tie-hands” and “sink-cost” signaling strategies. Fearon demonstrates (using formal methods) that costly signals are more successful if they involve a tie-hands strategy (create costs that would be paid ex post if they fail to uphold the commitment) rather than if a sink-cost strategy is pursued (which is only costly to the actor ex ante). The tie-hands strategy is connected to ex post domestic audience costs. The model also indicates that decision makers will not bluff with either type of costly signal; they will not incur or create costs and then fail to carry out the threat.

11. Rauchhaus notes that the analysis performed on the second data set covering only the years 1946 through 2000 (when nuclear weapons were available) did not produce different statistical or substantive results in comparisons between patterns of nuclear and nonnuclear disputes using the 1885–2000 database.

12. In an interesting study at the monadic level, Grieco ( 2012 ) conducts a comparative analysis of the conflict behavior of states before and after the acquisition of nuclear weapons. His principal finding is that states do not become more prone to the initiation of military crises after acquiring nuclear weapons.

13. In a more recent work, Vasquez (Senese & Vasquez, 2008 ) allows that nuclear weapons have raised the provocation threshold for total war: “What would have provoked a war between major states in the pre-nuclear era no longer does so” (Senese & Vasquez, 2008 , p. 62). Nevertheless, Vasquez ( 2009 ) continues to maintain that a proper evaluation of the effects of nuclear weapons on war is within the context of the “steps to war” model (e.g., Senese & Vasquez, 2008 ; Vasquez, 1993 ). For an alternative explanation of war based on a process of complex conjunctive causation see Geller and Singer ( 1998 ) and Geller ( 2000b , 2004 , 2005 ).

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Nuclear weapons: Why reducing the risk of nuclear war should be a key concern of our generation

The consequences of nuclear war would be devastating. much more should – and can – be done to reduce the risk that humanity will ever fight such a war..

The shockwave and heat that the detonation of a single nuclear weapon creates can end the lives of millions of people immediately.

But even larger is the devastation that would follow a nuclear war.

The first reason for this is nuclear fallout. Radioactive dust from the detonating bombs rises up into the atmosphere and spreads out over large areas of the world from where it falls down and causes deadly levels of radiation.

The second reason is less widely known. But this consequence – 'nuclear winter' and the worldwide famine that would follow – is now believed to be the most serious consequence of nuclear war.

Cities that are attacked by nuclear missiles burn at such an intensity that they create their own wind system, a firestorm: hot air above the burning city ascends and is replaced by air that rushes in from all directions. The storm-force winds fan the flames and create immense heat.

From this firestorm, large columns of smoke and soot rise up above the burning cities and travel all the way up to the stratosphere. There it spreads around the planet and blocks the sun’s light. At that great height – far above the clouds – it cannot be rained out, meaning that it will remain there for years, darkening the sky and thereby drying and chilling the planet.

The nuclear winter that would follow a large-scale nuclear war is expected to lead to temperature declines of 20 or even 30 degrees Celsius (60–86° F) in many of the world’s agricultural regions – including much of Eurasia and North America. Nuclear winter would cause a 'nuclear famine'. The world’s food production would fail and billions of people would starve. 1

These consequences – nuclear fallout and nuclear winter leading to famine – mean that the destruction caused by nuclear weapons is not contained to the battlefield. It would not just harm the attacked country. Nuclear war would devastate all countries, including the attacker.

The possibility of global devastation is what makes the prospect of nuclear war so very terrifying. And it is also why nuclear weapons are so unattractive for warfare. A weapon that can lead to self-destruction is not a weapon that can be used strategically.

US President Reagan put it in clear words at the height of the Cold War: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?” 2

Nuclear stockpiles have been reduced, but the risk remains high

40 years after Reagan’s words, the Cold War is over and nuclear stockpiles have been reduced considerably, as the chart shows.

The world has learned that nuclear armament is not the one-way street that it was once believed to be. Disarmament is possible.

But the chart also shows that there are still almost ten thousand nuclear weapons distributed among nine countries on our planet, at least. 3 Each of these weapons can cause enormous destruction; many are much larger than the ones that the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 4

Collectively these weapons are immensely destructive. The nuclear winter scenario outlined above would kill billions of people— billions— in the years that follow a large-scale nuclear war, even if it was fought “only” with today’s reduced stockpiles. 5

It is unclear whether humanity as a species could possibly survive a full-scale nuclear war with the current stockpiles. 6 A nuclear war might well be humanity’s final war.

Close Calls: Instances that threatened to push the ‘balance of terror’ out of balance and into war

The ‘balance of terror’ is the idea that all involved political leaders are so scared of nuclear war that they never launch a nuclear attack.

If this is achievable at all, it can only be achieved if all nuclear powers keep their weapons in check. This is because the balance is vulnerable to accidents: a nuclear bomb that detonates accidentally – or even just a false alarm, with no weapons even involved – can trigger nuclear retaliation because several countries keep their nuclear weapons on ‘launch on warning’; in response to a warning, their leaders can decide within minutes whether they want to launch a retaliatory strike.

For the balance of terror to be a balance, all parties need to be in control at all times. This however is not the case.

In the timeline, you can read through some of the close calls during the past decades.

The risk of nuclear war might well be low – because neither side would want to fight such a war that would have such awful consequences for everyone on the planet. But there is a risk that the kinds of technical errors and accidents listed here could lead accidentally to the use of nuclear weapons, as a nuclear power can incorrectly come to believe that they are under attack.

This is why false alarms, errors, and close calls are so crucial to monitor: they are the incidents that can push the ‘balance of terror’ out of balance and into war.

Accidents and errors are of course not the only possible path that could lead to the use of nuclear weapons. There is the risk of a terribly irresponsible person leading a country possessing nuclear weapons. There is the risk of nuclear terrorism, possibly after a terrorist organization steals weapons. There is the possibility that hackers can take control of the nuclear chain of command. And there is the possibility that several of these factors play a role at the same time.

A timeline of nuclear weapons ‘close calls’ 7

Below this post, you find additional lists of close calls, where you find much more information on each of these incidents.

How to reduce the risk of nuclear war?

An escalating conflict between nuclear powers – but also an accident, a hacker, a terrorist, or an irresponsible leader – could lead to the detonation of nuclear weapons.

Those risks only go to zero if all nuclear weapons are removed from the world. I believe this is what humanity should work towards, but it is exceedingly hard to achieve, at least in the short term. It is therefore important to see that there are additional ways that can reduce the chance of the world suffering the horrors of nuclear war. 8

A more peaceful world : Many world regions in which our ancestors fought merciless wars over countless generations are extraordinarily peaceful in our times. The rise of democracy, international trade, diplomacy, and a cultural attitude shift against the glorification of war are some of the drivers credited for this development. 9

Making the world a more peaceful place will reduce the risk of nuclear confrontation. Efforts that reduce the chance of any war reduce the chance of nuclear war.

Nuclear treaties : Several non-proliferation treaties have been key in achieving the large reduction of nuclear stockpiles. However, key treaties – like the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty between the US and Russia – have been suspended and additional agreements could be reached.

The UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which became effective in 2021, is a recent development in this direction.

Smaller nuclear stockpiles : Reducing the stockpiles further is seen as an important and achievable goal by experts.

It is considered achievable because smaller stockpiles would still provide the deterrence benefits from nuclear weapons. And it is important as it reduces the risk of accidents and the chance that a possible nuclear war would end civilization.

Better monitoring, better control: The risk can be further reduced by efforts to better control nuclear weapons – so that close calls occur less frequently. Similarly better monitoring systems would reduce the chance of false alarms.

Taking nuclear weapons off ‘hair-trigger alert’ would reduce the risk that any accident that does occur can rapidly spiral out of control. And a well-resourced International Atomic Energy Agency can verify that the agreements in the treaties are met.

Better public understanding, global relations, and culture : Finally I also believe that it will help to see clearly that billions of us share the same goal. None of us wants to live through a nuclear war, none of us wants to die in one. As Reagan said, a nuclear war cannot be won and it would be better to do away with these weapons entirely.

A generation ago a broad and highly visible societal movement pursued the goal of nuclear disarmament. These efforts were to a good extent successful. But since then, this goal has unfortunately lost much of the attention it once received – and this is despite the fact that things have not fundamentally changed: the world still possesses weapons that could kill billions. 10 I wish it was a more prominent concern in our generation so that more young people would set themselves the goal to make the world safe from nuclear weapons.

Below this post you find resources on where you can get engaged or donate, to help reduce the danger from nuclear weapons.

I believe some dangers are exaggerated – for example, I believe that the fear of terrorist attacks is often wildly out of proportion with the actual risk. But when it comes to nuclear weapons I believe the opposite is true.

There are many today who hardly give nuclear conflict a thought and I think this is a big mistake.

For eight decades, people have been producing nuclear weapons. Several countries have dedicated vast sums of money to their construction. And now we live in a world in which these weapons endanger our entire civilization and our future.

These destructive weapons are perhaps the clearest example that technology and innovation are not only forces for good, they can also enable catastrophic destruction.

Without the Second World War and the Cold War, the world might have never developed these weapons and we might find the idea that anyone could possibly build such weapons unimaginable. But this is not the world we live in. We live in a world with weapons of enormous destructiveness and we have to see the risks that they pose to all of us and find ways to reduce them.

I hope that there are many in the world today who take on the challenge to make the world more peaceful and to reduce the risk from nuclear weapons. The goal has to be that humanity never ends up using this most destructive technology that we ever developed.

Resources to continue reading and finding ways to reduce the risk of nuclear weapons

• Hiroshima : John Hersey’s report for the New Yorker about the bombing of Hiroshima, published in August 1946.
• ’80,000 Hours’ profile on Nuclear Security : an article focusing on the question of how to choose a career that makes the world safer from nuclear weapons.
• The ‘Future of Life Institute’ on Nuclear Weapons : this page includes an extensive list of additional references – including videos, research papers, and many organizations that are dedicated to reducing the risk from nuclear weapons.

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Charlie Giattino, Hannah Ritchie, and Edouard Mathieu for reading drafts of this and for their very helpful comments and ideas.

Additional lists of close calls with nuclear weapons

* Future of Life Institute – Accidental nuclear war: A timeline of close calls .

* Alan F. Philips, M.D. – 20 Mishaps That Might Have Started Accidental Nuclear War , published on Nuclear Files

* Josh Harkinson (2014) – That Time We Almost Nuked North Carolina

* Union of Concerned Scientists (2015) – Close Calls with Nuclear Weapons

* Chatham House Report (2014) – Too Close for Comfort: Cases of Near Nuclear Use and Options for Policy authored by Patricia Lewis, Heather Williams, Benoît Pelopidas, and Sasan Aghlani

* Wikipedia – List of Nuclear Close Calls

On Nuclear Winter see:

* Jägermeyr, Jonas, Alan Robock, Joshua Elliott, Christoph Müller, Lili Xia, Nikolay Khabarov, Christian Folberth, et al. (2020) – ‘ A Regional Nuclear Conflict Would Compromise Global Food Security’ . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 13 (31 March 2020): 7071–81.

* Robock, A., L. Oman, and G. L. Stenchikov (2007) – Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences , J. Geophys. Res., 112, D13107, doi:10.1029/2006JD008235.

* Alan Robock & Owen Brian Toon (2012) – Self-assured destruction: The climate impacts of nuclear war . In Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 68, 66–74.

* Alan Robock & Owen Brian Toon (2016) – Let’s End the Peril of a Nuclear Winter , In the New York Times, Feb. 11, 2016.

Some additional points:

* The risk of nuclear winter (initially termed ‘nuclear twilight’) was only discovered in the early 1980s, more than 3 decades after the bombs were first used.

* The main mechanism by which a nuclear winter is expected to cause a decline in global food production is by reducing the growing season, the days in a row without frost. See Robock, Oman, and Stenchikov (2007).

* Robock estimates that the smoke and soot would rise as high as 40 kilometers (25 miles) into the atmosphere. See Robock and Toon (2016).

* Before the nuclear famine kills people from hunger, many will die from hypothermia.

* In addition to the impact on the climate, the ozone layer is expected to get depleted in such a scenario. This would allow more ultraviolet radiation to reach our planet’s surface, harming plant and animal life.

* In general there is only relatively little scientific work that focuses on nuclear winter and additional, good research could be useful to provide a better understanding. Due to the lack of research there remains uncertainty about how devastating a nuclear winter would be. In particular there is disagreement on how likely it is that all of humanity would die in a nuclear winter.

* The paper by Jägermeyr et al (2020) shows that among the countries with the largest food production losses would be the US and Russia, those countries that have the largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

For anyone who interested in the impact of nuclear winter on food production and famine, Ord (2020) cites the following:

* Cropper, W. P., and Harwell, M. A. (1986) – “Food Availability after Nuclear War,” in M. A. Harwell and T. C. Hutchinson (eds.), The Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War (SCOPE 28), vol. 2: Ecological, Agricultural, and Human Effects. John Wiley and Sons.

* Helfand, I. (2013) – Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk? Physicians for Social Responsibility.

* Xia, L., Robock, A., Mills, M., Stenke, A., and Helfand, I. (2015) – Decadal Reduction of Chinese Agriculture after a Regional Nuclear War . Earth’s Future, 3(2), 37–48.

Reagan in his State of the Union address in 1984, quoted in the New York Times: Bernard Gwertzman (1984) – Reagan reassures Russians on war . In the New York Times January 26, 1984.

There are nine countries that are known to possess nuclear weapons: Russia, United States, France, China, United Kingdom, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea. South Africa once possessed nuclear weapons and is the first state to voluntarily give up nuclear weapons.

The explosive power of a nuclear weapon is called the yield of a nuclear weapon. It is the amount of energy released when that weapon is detonated. It is usually measured in ‘TNT equivalents’.

The bomb that the US dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 13–18 kilotons of TNT. (one kiloton are 1000 tonnes)

The largest bomb that was ever detonated is the ‘Tsar Bomba’ built by the USSR and detonated in October 1961. Its yield was about 50 megatons of TNT. That’s 50,000 kilotons of TNT or about 3,333-times the yield of the bomb in Hiroshima.

The scenario in Robock, Oman, and Stenchikov (2007) is based on the nuclear stockpiles after the large reduction that was achieved after the end of the Cold War. It shows that the world still retains enough weapons to produce “a large, long-lasting, unprecedented global climate change,” as the authors put it. Since the publication of this study, the stockpiles have been reduced further, as the chart shows, but not very strongly so.

For a recent discussion of this question see Ord (2020) – The Precipice.

This list is largely based on Toby Ord’s 2020 book The Precipice . His list can be found in Chapter 4 and Appendix C of his book.

Ord in turn relies mostly on a document from the US Department of Defense from 1981: Narrative Summaries of Accidents Involving US Nuclear Weapons (1950–1980) .

This list is mostly based on the ’80,000 Hours’ profile on Nuclear Security and Toby Ord (2020) – The Precipice.

For big overviews of this literature see the forthcoming book Christopher Blattman (2022) – Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace and Steven Pinker (2011) – The Better Angels of our Nature for a big overview

Lawrence S. Wittner – Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement . Stanford University Press.

One indication for the declining interest in the last generation: Mentions of “nuclear war” in books and newspapers peaked in 1985 and declined strongly since then (see Google Ngram for ‘nuclear war’ ).

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Home — Essay Samples — War — Nuclear War — The Threat Of Global Nuclear War

The Threat of Global Nuclear War

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The Nuclear War Impacts Essay

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Risk of Nuclear War

Consequences, works cited.

The proliferation of nuclear weapons significantly increases the likelihood of accidents leading to large-scale conflicts between nuclear-armed states such as Russia, the United States, India, Pakistan, and China, among others. Taking into consideration the sheer size of the existing nuclear arsenals, both inadvertent and deliberate war between any of these nations could have disastrous effects on the population of the whole world. This paper argues that because nuclear war is associated with devastating humanitarian consequences, disarmament efforts must be supported by all world governments and societies.

In their article titled “Analyzing and Reducing the Risks of Inadvertent Nuclear War Between the United States and Russia,” Barrett et al. explore the possibility of conflict between the United States and Russia (106). The authors argue that concerns about intentional attacks have led both countries to focus on developing counter-attack protocols rather than concentrating on deterrence capabilities (Barrett et al. 106). The findings of the study show that the annual probability of inadvertent war between the United States and Russia on a scale from 0 to 1 “ranges from 0.0001 to 0.05 if excluding launch during low tensions” (Barrett et al. 120). Therefore, it could be argued that despite substantial progress in minimizing the risks of nuclear war, the chances of inadvertent nuclear conflict between the two states are still high. As a result, it is necessary to further explore the impact of such conflicts in order to develop comprehensive strategies for risk reduction that go beyond de-alerting agreements. In fact, the issue of the proliferation and reduction of nuclear armaments is so pressing that President Obama has placed it at the top of the U.S. national security agenda, arguing that it is “a threat that rises above all others in urgency” (Allison 82).

The last several decades have been marked by a significant expansion of the body of knowledge concerning the climatic consequences of nuclear war. Climatic models have helped demonstrate how nuclear weapons could completely destroy not only humans but also many other species. Interestingly enough, during the Manhattan Project and throughout the whole period of the Cold War, almost no research was done on the “dust, fire, and smoke effects of nuclear blasts” (Edwards 34). Two independent groups of scientists from Russia and the United States who have studied the consequences of nuclear war have reached the same conclusions: the northern hemisphere would see a drop in surface temperature below freezing within just a couple of days. The researchers have also argued that nuclear war would cover the globe in smoke, destroying agricultural production and bringing “severe consequences for humanity” (Edwards 36).

It is important to realize that even if the threat of a full-scale conflict between the United States and Russia that could result in a nuclear winter was somehow eliminated, the danger of nuclear war between states like India and Pakistan would remain. According to Robock and Toon, India and Pakistan have produced more than 50 nuclear warheads each (77). If the two countries were to release their nuclear arsenal on the biggest industrial areas, the smoke resulting from the blast would disrupt agriculture around the world for ten years (Robock and Toon 77). The researchers have also estimated that the explosion of 50 bombs in India would create four million metric tons of smoke particles, which could cover the surface of the globe in only 49 days (Robock and Toon 77). Another study suggests that a nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan could result in a ten to forty percent reduction in maize yields and a two to twenty percent reduction in soybean yields in the midwestern United States (Özdoğan et al. 373). These changes would occur due to the injection of a tremendous amount of elemental carbon into the troposphere, bringing about significant climatic anomalies (Özdoğan et al. 373).

A recent article titled “Long-term Radiation-Related Health Effects in a Unique Human Population: Lessons Learned from the Atomic Bomb Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” by Douple et al. summarizes the findings of a research study that lasted for 63 years (124). The study revealed that there is a significant correlation between radiation exposure and increased cancer mortalities among atomic bomb survivors in Japan (Douple et al. 127). Specifically, the scientists have found a relationship between exposure to radiation and the incidence of cancers of the oral cavity, esophagus, stomach, colon, liver, lung, nonmelanocytic skin, breasts, ovary, urinary bladder, and central nervous system (Douple et al. 128). Figure 1 shows radiation-associated deaths per year.

Taking into consideration the fact that numerous studies suggest that humanitarian consequences of even a small-scale regional conflict could be devastating, there is a high degree of certainty that no state in the world would be protected from the impact of nuclear war. Therefore, it is necessary to implement a nuclear weapon ban on a worldwide scale. Although many people argue that nuclear-armed states will be unwilling to give up their armaments, the strategic significance of the issue underlines the importance of overcoming resistance to disarmament. Indeed, in order to ensure international security, it is necessary to change the discourse on nuclear weapons.

Allison, Graham. “Nuclear Disorder: Surveying Atomic Threats.” Foreign Affairs , vol. 89, no. 1, 2010, pp. 74-85.

Barrett, Anthony, et al. “Analyzing and Reducing the Risks of Inadvertent Nuclear War Between the United States and Russia.” Science & Global Security , vol. 21, no. 2, 2013, pp. 106-133.

Douple, Evan, et al. “Long-term Radiation-Related Health Effects in a Unique Human Population: Lessons Learned from the Atomic Bomb Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, vol. 5, no. 1, 2011, pp. 121-133.

Edwards, Paul. “Entangled Histories: Climate Science and Nuclear Weapons Research.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , vol. 68, no. 4, 2012, pp. 28-40.

Özdoğan, Mutlu, et al. “Impacts of a Nuclear War in South Asia on Soybean and Maize Production in the Midwest United States.” Climatic Change, vol. 116, no. 2, 2012, pp. 373-87.

Robock, Alan and Brian Toon. “Local Nuclear War, Global Suffering.” Scientific American , vol. 61, no. 12, 2011, pp. 74-81.

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• Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Historic Attitudes
• India as the Only External Threat to Pakistan
• Hiroshima and Nagasaki Atomic Bombings
• The Departure of US Forces: Aftermath of Iraq and Syria
• The Arab-Israeli Conflict Analysis
• The Entry and Withdrawal of America’s Troop in Iraq
• Vietnam War vs. War on Terror in the Middle East
• The Rights of Enemies at War in Islam
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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You and the Atom Bomb

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Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected. The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff, and there has been much reiteration of the useless statement that the bomb “ought to be put under international control.” But curiously little has been said, at any rate in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely: “How difficult are these things to manufacture?”

Such information as we – that is, the big public – possess on this subject has come to us in a rather indirect way, apropos of President Truman’s decision not to hand over certain secrets to the USSR. Some months ago, when the bomb was still only a rumour, there was a widespread belief that splitting the atom was merely a problem for the physicists, and that when they had solved it a new and devastating weapon would be within reach of almost everybody. (At any moment, so the rumour went, some lonely lunatic in a laboratory might blow civilisation to smithereens, as easily as touching off a firework.)

Had that been true, the whole trend of history would have been abruptly altered. The distinction between great states and small states would have been wiped out, and the power of the State over the individual would have been greatly weakened. However, it appears from President Truman’s remarks, and various comments that have been made on them, that the bomb is fantastically expensive and that its manufacture demands an enormous industrial effort, such as only three or four countries in the world are capable of making. This point is of cardinal importance, because it may mean that the discovery of the atomic bomb, so far from reversing history, will simply intensify the trends which have been apparent for a dozen years past.

It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon – so long as there is no answer to it – gives claws to the weak.

The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle. After the invention of the flintlock, and before the invention of the percussion cap, the musket was a fairly efficient weapon, and at the same time so simple that it could be produced almost anywhere. Its combination of qualities made possible the success of the American and French revolutions, and made a popular insurrection a more serious business than it could be in our own day. After the musket came the breech-loading rifle . This was a comparatively complex thing, but it could still be produced in scores of countries, and it was cheap, easily smuggled and economical of ammunition. Even the most backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one source or another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccans – even Tibetans – could put up a fight for their independence, sometimes with success. But thereafter every development in military technique has favoured the State as against the individual, and the industrialised country as against the backward one. There are fewer and fewer foci of power. Already, in 1939, there were only five states capable of waging war on the grand scale, and now there are only three – ultimately, perhaps, only two. This trend has been obvious for years, and was pointed out by a few observers even before 1914. The one thing that might reverse it is the discovery of a weapon – or, to put it more broadly, of a method of fighting – not dependent on huge concentrations of industrial plant.

From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet possess the secret of making the atomic bomb; on the other hand, the consensus of opinion seems to be that they will possess it within a few years. So we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather hastily assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual end to the machine civilisation. But suppose – and really this the likeliest development – that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.

When James Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution it seemed probable to many Americans that the Germans would win the European end of the war, and it was therefore natural to assume that Germany and not Russia would dominate the Eurasian land mass, while Japan would remain master of East Asia. This was a miscalculation, but it does not affect the main argument. For Burnham’s geographical picture of the new world has turned out to be correct. More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being parcelled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise or another, by a self-elected oligarchy. The haggling as to where the frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will continue for some years, and the third of the three super-states – East Asia, dominated by China – is still potential rather than actual. But the general drift is unmistakable, and every scientific discovery of recent years has accelerated it.

We were once told that the aeroplane had “abolished frontiers”; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable. The radio was once expected to promote international understanding and co-operation; it has turned out to be a means of insulating one nation from another. The atomic bomb may complete the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt, and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a basis of military equality. Unable to conquer one another, they are likely to continue ruling the world between them, and it is difficult to see how the balance can be upset except by slow and unpredictable demographic changes.

For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham’s theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications – that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of “cold war” with its neighbours.

Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police State. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a “peace that is no peace”.

Tribune , 19 October 1945

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Thinking about the Unthinkable: Five Nuclear Weapons Issues to Address in 2024

Photo: Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images

Commentary by Kelsey Hartigan

Published February 9, 2024

As the United States gears up for a presidential election and the administration juggles support to Ukraine, growing conflict in the Middle East, and a host of other challenges, Washington will need to address five key nuclear weapons challenges in 2024. Managing Russia’s nuclear threats, China’s opaque nuclear buildup, and North Korea’s increasing provocations—and the increasingly close relationships among them—will be no easy feat. At the same time, Washington will need to navigate its extended deterrence commitments and efforts to better integrate with U.S. allies and finally organize for a series of consequential, long-term decisions on the future of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. While a high-intensity war with China or Russia or a major conflict with North Korea is not inevitable, the pathways to potential conflicts are increasing, and so too are the risks of nuclear use—especially limited nuclear use. With an exceedingly complex international security environment, policymakers, planners, and legislatures need to think about the unthinkable this year and take action. Detering nuclear use requires a sober assessment of the new and changing ways adversaries are attempting to leverage nuclear weapons and clear-eyed plans for how to manage nuclear threats if deterrence fails.

Here are the top five nuclear issues to address in 2024:

• Russia’s Nuclear Threats and the War in Ukraine

As the war in Ukraine enters its third year and the administration and Congress debate future U.S. security assistance to Ukraine, a key question will be how Russia’s nuclear signaling and threats will evolve in 2024 and how the trajectory of the conflict will affect the potential for nuclear use. While the risk of use likely remains low amid the current stalemate, significant changes on the ground, such as a significant spike in attacks deep inside Russia, could affect that calculus. In addition, with increased cooperation between Russia and North Korea (and Iran) and confirmation that North Korea is providing Russia with ballistic missiles and ballistic missile launchers, another key question will be to what extent this kind of assistance affects the situation on the ground, whether this prolongs the conflict, and how this affects overall escalation dynamics. With the intelligence community assessing that “Moscow will become even more reliant on nuclear, cyber, and space capabilities as it deals with the extensive damage to Russia’s ground forces,” nuclear risks could actually grow in the coming months and years, making it essential that Washington, NATO, and Kyiv remain prepared and clear-eyed about how to handle a range of scenarios, especially those involving “ battlefield” nuclear weapons and limited nuclear use.

In addition, while U.S. officials have indicated that they have not yet seen changes to Russia’s strategic nuclear forces since it suspended New START, without onsite inspections or data exchanges, it may become more difficult over time to maintain confidence that there have been no militarily significant operational changes to Russia’s strategic forces using national technical means alone. This means there will be very few guardrails on the broader U.S.-Russia strategic relationship, making it—as well as Russia’s efforts to deliberately manipulate nuclear risks in Ukraine and beyond—one of the top nuclear issues to watch in 2024.

• China’s Nuclear Buildup

China’s rapid expansion and diversification of its nuclear forces also demands attention in 2024. While the administration has made clear that “the United States does not need to increase our nuclear forces to outnumber the combined total of our competitors in order to successfully deter them,” a number of recent high-profile commissions, reports , and studies argue for important changes to U.S. nuclear forces, setting up a renewed debate over what’s driving China’s nuclear buildup and whether and how the United States should respond . China’s nuclear buildup cannot be viewed in isolation, however. This is fundamentally a question of whether the United States has the necessary force structure to manage concurrent or sequential conflicts with two nuclear-armed adversaries—a force-sizing construct the Pentagon abandoned years ago (and never truly had to address in the same way).

At the same time, the debate over potential changes to the size and composition of U.S. nuclear forces cannot mask questions over how Washington and its allies would respond to Chinese nuclear coercion or even limited nuclear use in certain scenarios, particularly a Taiwan   crisis . Such a crisis could occur well before any changes to the current program of record materialize, and China is no doubt watching how Russia is deliberately manipulating nuclear risks in the war in Ukraine. With continued cross-Strait tensions and an uncertain future for the broader U.S.-China relationship, it is essential that officials understand the conditions under which China might use nuclear weapons and be prepared to manage the nuclear shadow that will loom over virtually any conventional conflict in the Indo-Pacific. Arms control talks with China may help improve this understanding over time, but recent efforts to engage on these issues are unlikely to translate into a reliable risk reduction mechanism any time soon or change the operational dilemmas U.S. forces might encounter. This means that Washington and its allies need to deepen planning and consultations in 2024 on managing the nuclear shadow with China for if and when a conflict occurs and ensure that these efforts are fully integrated into broader defense planning efforts.

• Tensions with North Korea and Opportunistic Aggression

In his New Year address, Kim Jong-unn warned that North Korea needs to prepare for war with the United States in 2024 and pointed to the U.S.-Republic of Korea (ROK) Washington Declaration, increased trilateral exercises, and the more visible presence of U.S. strategic assets as the reason behind the North’s aggressive posturing. While to some extent, this kind of rhetoric and blame game is more of the same— especially in an election year —North Korea’s continued quantitative and qualitative growth of its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, including both long-range systems capable of striking the United States and its increasing emphasis on tactical nuclear weapons, pose serious threats to the United States, ROK, and Japan that cannot be ignored or wished away. Washington and Seoul cannot deter missile tests or satellite launches, but they can take steps to ensure U.S. and ROK forces are prepared for both major conflicts as well as localized attacks , which can in turn help deter a war that no one wants. This requires consistently updating plans and assumptions, clarifying roles and responsibilities, and maintaining readiness for a wide range of North Korea contingencies. Maintaining this focus can be difficult given all of the demands on U.S. forces and the attention on great power competition, but it is essential.

At the same time, tensions on the Korean Peninsula don’t exist in a vacuum, and possible North Korean contingencies or conflicts cannot be planned against in isolation . As North Korea and Russia step up their cooperation, ties between Russia and China increase, and China and North Korea rekindle links, 2024 will unfortunately likely serve as a reminder that it is not enough to focus on managing individual flashpoints with Russia and China. If the United States finds itself in a conventional conflict with China or Russia, it could provide a dangerous opening for North Korea to exploit, just as a conflict with North Korea could leave the United States and its allies dangerously unprepared to manage a bubbling over of tensions with Russia or China (Russia and China could also of course take advantage of regional conflicts in separate theaters, which would pose even greater constraints).

Understanding and better preparing for the risks and tradeoffs associated with these types of opportunistic aggression scenarios, whether coordinated or not, should be a top priority in 2024. This will require, among many things, difficult and frank consultations on the limitations and possible roles and responsibilities across various alliance structures in the Indo-Pacific, as well as with NATO allies.

• U.S. Extended Deterrence Commitments and Integration with U.S. Allies

U.S. allies are understandably skeptical over whether the United States can and will maintain its alliance commitments. Managing these concerns—especially in an election year—will require continued time and attention, a requirement many U.S. allies in Europe and Asia worry could be increasingly difficult given the upcoming election and deteriorating situation in the Middle East and the demands the region is once again placing on U.S. officials. The Biden administration took important steps in 2023 to strengthen alliances and extended deterrence assurances to U.S. allies, and deepen planning and coordination on key crisis management issues. Finding ways to institutionalize and deepen these efforts will be critical. These efforts should focus on a range of possible conflict scenarios with Russia, China, and North Korea and dig into some hard questions: What specifically do various alliances intend to deter? Who would do what in a crisis? What might be perceived as escalatory? How would allies communicate with one another and the public during a contingency? How might various alliances might integrate conventional and nuclear operations during a crisis, or take certain actions to deter opportunistic aggression?

It will also be important to watch how Washington postures its nuclear forces over the next year to both assure allies and demonstrate its readiness and resolve to U.S. adversaries. The United States has shifted to a much more dynamic mode of messaging and communicating its nuclear force movements—from a significant uptick in bomber task force missions to a much more visible presence for U.S. ballistic missile submarines . Going forward, officials need to take a holistic look at what effect these measures have (and what the implications for future force management decisions might be) and find opportunities to monitor how certain actions or exercises in one theater register, or not, with adversaries in another.

• Progress on U.S. Nuclear Modernization

Finally, with such a dynamic threat environment, 2024 will be a critical year for the nuclear enterprise. Every major element of U.S. nuclear forces is being modernized. But delays, budget overruns , supply chain issues, and significant workforce and infrastructure constraints across both the defense and national lab sectors are leading to an increasing disconnect between policy debates over what might be needed in the future and the reality of what the existing workforce and infrastructure can support. This needs to change in 2024. Congress needs to change the way it oversees defense and National Nuclear Security Administration programs and work with the Pentagon to enact significant changes to the way the enterprise assesses risks—not just the risks of delays across the nuclear enterprise but also to conventional acquisition programs that are critical to our ability to deter, and prevail in, if necessary, a high-intensity conflict. To be clear, this is not just a resourcing issue. Service members will soon be operating both legacy and replacement systems concurrently—a challenge the U.S. Air Force and Navy have not encountered for decades. Managing these issues requires leadership and careful attention from the highest levels—a commodity that is often in short supply.

Unfortunately, these are far from the only challenges the United States and its allies will have to contend with in 2024. Washington will also have to manage the growing proxy war with Iran and ongoing concerns about its nuclear program, as well as a host of other nonproliferation challenges.

Thinking about the unthinkable in 2024 does not mean reviving Strangelovian concepts from the Cold War. Instead, it is about being realistic about the potential for direct conflicts with Russia, China, or North Korea and wrestling with a more difficult and uncomfortable question: If the United States goes to war, is it prepared to manage nuclear coercion and respond to potential nuclear use?

Kelsey Hartigan is deputy director of the Project on Nuclear Issues and senior fellow with the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

Commentary is produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).

© 2024 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. All rights reserved.

Kelsey Hartigan

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On Top of Everything Else, Nuclear War Would Be a Climate Problem

Even a “minor” skirmish would wreck the planet.

When we talk about what causes climate change, we usually talk about oil and gas, coal and cars, and—just generally—energy policy. There’s a good reason for this. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, which enters the atmosphere, warms the climate, and … you know the drill. The more fossil fuels you burn, the worse climate change gets. That’s why, a couple of years ago, I spent a lot of time covering the Trump administration’s attempt to weaken the country’s fuel-economy standards. It was an awful policy, one that would have led to more oil consumption for decades to come. If pressed, I would have said that it had a single-digit-percentage chance of creating an uninhabitable climate system.

But energy is not the only domain that has a direct bearing on whether we have a livable climate or not. So does foreign policy—specifically, nuclear war.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine two weeks ago, that threat has become a lot more real: Many Americans, including artists , climate-concerned progressives, and even a few lawmakers , have come out in support of a “no-fly zone.” But despite its euphemistic name, a no-fly zone means that NATO and the United States issue a credible threat that they will shoot down any enemy plane in Ukrainian territory. This would require U.S. bombing runs into Russian territory to eliminate air defenses, bringing the U.S. and Russia into open war, and it would have a reasonable chance of prompting a nuclear exchange. And it would be worse for the climate than any energy policy that Donald Trump ever proposed.

I mean this quite literally. If you are worried about rapid, catastrophic changes to the planet’s climate, then you must be worried about nuclear war. That is because, on top of killing tens of millions of people, even a relatively “minor” exchange of nuclear weapons would wreck the planet’s climate in enormous and long-lasting ways.

Read: A 10-year-old nuclear-blast simulator is popular again

Consider a one-megaton nuke , reportedly the size of a warhead on a modern Russian intercontinental ballistic missile. (Warheads on U.S. ICBMs can be even larger.) A detonation of a bomb that size would, within about a four-mile radius, produce winds equal to those in a Category 5 hurricane, immediately flattening buildings, knocking down power lines, and triggering gas leaks. Anyone within seven miles of the detonation would suffer third-degree burns , the kind that sear and blister flesh. These conditions—and note that I have left out the organ-destroying effects of radiation—would rapidly turn an eight-mile blast radius into a zone of total human misery. But only at this moment of the war do the climate consequences truly begin.

The hot, dry, hurricane-force winds would act like a supercharged version of California’s Santa Ana winds , which have triggered some of the state’s worst wildfires. Even in a small war, that would happen at dozens of places around the planet, igniting urban and wildland forest fires as large as small states. A 2007 study estimated that if 100 small nuclear weapons were detonated, a number equal to only 0.03 percent of the planet’s total arsenal, the number of “direct fatalities due to fire and smoke would be comparable to those worldwide in World War II.” Towering clouds would carry more than five megatons of soot and ash from these fires high into the atmosphere.

All this carbon would transform the climate, shielding it from the sun’s heat. Within months, the planet’s average temperature would fall by more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit; some amount of this cooling would persist for more than a decade. But far from reversing climate change, this cooling would be destabilizing. It would reduce global precipitation by about 10 percent, inducing global drought conditions. In parts of North America and Europe, the growing season would shorten by 10 to 20 days.

This would prompt a global food crisis the world hasn’t seen in modern times. Corn, wheat, and soybean yields would all decline by more than 11 percent over five years. In a slightly larger conflict—involving, say, 250 of the world’s 13,080 nuclear weapons—the oceans would become less bountiful; the photosynthesizing plankton that form the basis of the marine food chain would become 5 to 15 percent less productive . In the case of a U.S.-Russia war, fishers worldwide would see their catches decline by nearly 30 percent.

And even though the world would get cooler, the nuclear winter resulting from a full-blown global conflict (or even “nuclear fall,” as some researchers prefer) would not reverse the effect of what we might morbidly call “traditional” human-caused climate change. In the short term, the effects of ocean acidification would get worse , not better. The layer of smoke in the atmosphere would destroy as much as 75 percent of the ozone layer. That means that more UV radiation would slip through the planet’s atmosphere, causing a pandemic of skin cancer and other medical issues. It would affect not just humans, either—even on the remotest islands, the higher UV rates would imperil plants and animals otherwise untouched by the global carnage.

Nowadays, we don’t tend to think of nuclear war as a climate problem, but concerns over these kinds of dangers were part of how modern climate change achieved political prominence in the first place. During the 1980s, a set of scientists raised the alarm about the effects of a nuclear winter and of the growing “hole in the ozone layer.” As the Stanford professor Paul N. Edwards writes in A Vast Machine , his magisterial history of climate modeling, these environmental issues taught the world that the planet’s entire atmosphere could come under threat at once, priming the public to understand the risks of global warming.

And even before that, climate science and nuclear-weapons engineering were twin disciplines of a sort. John von Neumann, a Princeton physicist and member of the Manhattan Project, took interest in the first programmable computer in 1945 because he hoped that it could solve two problems: the mechanics of a hydrogen-bomb explosion and the mathematical modeling of Earth’s climate. At the time, military interest in meteorology was high. Not only had a good weather forecast helped secure Allied victory on D-Day, but officials feared that weather manipulation would become a weapon in the unfolding Cold War.

The worst fears of that era, thankfully, never came to pass. Or at least, they haven’t happened yet. It is up to us to make sure that they don’t.

Read: A sicker, poorer, and less abundant world

Outside of the direct effects of the bombs themselves, the full effect of a nuclear exchange could be even worse. If several years of gasoline- and diesel-fueled conventional military operations followed the global destruction, then the permanent consequences for the climate system would be even worse. That would also be true if society tried to rebuild by undertaking a fossil-powered reconstruction—and that would very likely be the case. The ruins of our postwar society would be poorer, and fossil reserves are the easiest energy sources to locate. Renewables, wind turbines, and other decarbonization technology, meanwhile, require secure factories, highly educated engineers, and complicated global networks of trade and exchange. They depend, in other words, on everything that peace provides. Solving climate change is a luxury of a planet at peace with itself.

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A Nuclear Weapon Strikes. What Happens Next?

Here’s what just one detonation could do..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions. [MUSIC PLAYING]

I’m Kathleen Kingsbury, and I oversee “The New York Times Opinion” section. This week, we’re launching a project that looks at the growing threat of nuclear war. According to our yearlong reporting effort, the possibility of a nuclear strike is now more likely than any time since the Cold War.

Vladimir Putin has warned NATO countries they risk nuclear war if they send troops to Ukraine.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

All nine nuclear nations are believed to be modernizing their arsenals. And the treaties meant to stop nuclear war between the US and Russia are all but gone.

As part of our project, we decided to tell the story of what’s at stake by illustrating one way nuclear detonation could unfold today. It’s based on testimonies of people who have survived atomic attacks and deep research from experts. What you’ll hear next is this scenario brought to life in sound.

An olive green big rig drives slowly down a remote highway. It winds through fields that stretch out on either side before pulling to a grinding stop.

The truck’s trailer begins tilting upward. On top, a nuclear warhead fits snugly into the cone of a short range missile.

The rocket engines underneath the missile suddenly come alive. A column of fire and gas lifts the missile from the truck toward the sky. Within minutes, the missile reaches a blistering speed of 5,000 miles per hour. It plunges toward the embattled city below. A third of a mile above the ground, the warhead explodes.

What comes next happens in a blink. Within a millisecond, the weapon’s plutonium core and surrounding contents convert into ionized gas and electromagnetic waves.

The explosion lets off a flash of light that envelops the sky for miles. It briefly blinds everyone in range. Then comes the roar of 9,000 tons of TNT that quakes the city.

Almost instantaneously, a massive fireball blooms. Temperatures inside the explosion reach millions of degrees.

The fireball is hotter than the surface of the sun. On the ground, nearly everything flammable ignites — wood, plastic, gas. It melts metal and scorches concrete.

Birds and small animals burst into flames, then become ash. Ruptured gas and electricity lines fuel the growing fires. The inferno can rage for miles beyond the initial explosion. The firestorm consumes enough oxygen to suffocate anyone sheltering in vehicles or homes.

Then comes the blast wave. A rumbling force races through the city in every direction. Buildings, trees, and living things are torn apart and thrown at one another. Near the explosion’s epicenter, buildings heave, sag, and crumble. Scalding hot glass and debris shoot like shrapnel into whatever lies in their path.

Dry leaves crackle like popcorn and disappear in the blazing heat. One mile from the epicenter, bricks and beams fall into piles, crushing people below. Trees uproot and fall to the ground. Cars and trucks appear stomped by giants.

The wreckage, what was once asphalt, steel, soil, glass, flesh and bone, is all suctioned into the roiling stem of a mushroom cloud that rises miles above the city. That cloud appears like a living thing. Its colors change from white to yellow to red to black. It billows miles into the sky until it eclipses the sun.

Then, darkness. A ringing stillness. Taking a breath is difficult. The air is thick with smoke and debris. What still lives spits out mouthfuls of dust and glass fragments, only to take in more. Screams begin for help, for death. But no help is on the way. Medical workers in the immediate area are dead or injured.

The toll of this one warhead — thousands dead and exponentially more wounded. A single missile.

It will be days before outside rescue workers can venture safely into the affected areas. Debris and destruction are making roads, tunnels, and railway systems impassable. Cell towers and power poles are knocked over and disconnected. There are widespread power outages. Electrical substations are damaged or destroyed.

Radiation sickness sets in. It begins with bouts of nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Days or weeks after exposure, people who look fine suddenly lose chunks of hair, become anemic and weak, and begin bleeding internally. Their immune systems start to fail, making them helpless against the infectious diseases that have begun to spread — dysentery, typhoid, cholera.

The debris churned up by the blast, along with the soot and ash from the raging fires, begins to settle back to Earth. Thick black water droplets laced with radioactive material fall from the sky. Black rain showers fall miles away from the detonation, staining nearly everything they touch. The effects are widespread and lasting. Damage to the ecosystem will linger for years if radiation passes through the food chain.

We are witnessing the dawn of a new nuclear era, and with it, a burgeoning arms race. A 2022 study found that even a, quote, “limited nuclear war” could cause catastrophic global climate impacts. Some models estimate 27 million people could die, and as many as 255 million people may starve within two years. Yet, most of the world has barely registered the current threat. Maybe it’s because an entire generation came of age after the Cold War.

Nuclear war is often described as unimaginable, but in fact, it’s not imagined enough.

By ‘The Opinions’

Produced by Phoebe Lett and Alison Bruzek

What would it feel like to live through a nuclear attack? A scenario that might have once felt relegated to the Cold War era now feels less and less remote.

The world’s nine nuclear powers are believed to be modernizing their arsenals. Today’s generation of tactical nuclear weapons pose an unpredictable threat. And Vladimir Putin recently threatened the United States and Europe with nuclear retaliation if they become more involved in the war in Ukraine.

In this fictionalized audio scenario, Times Opinion imagines the aftermath of one nuclear strike, informed by leading research, hundreds of hours of interviews with experts and accounts from those who have survived nuclear fallout.

This is part of At the Brink , a series from New York Times Opinion about the growing threat of nuclear weapons in an unstable world.

(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)

This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Phoebe Lett and Alison Bruzek. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin, Annie-Rose Strasser, Krista Mahr and Meeta Agrawal. The scenario was voiced by Jonah Kessel, and written by W.J. Hennigan. Fact-checking by Spencer Cohen, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Mixing, sound design and original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta, Kristina Samulewski and Derek Arthur. The executive producer of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Katie Kingsbury.

This Times Opinion series is funded through philanthropic grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York , Outrider Foundation and the Prospect Hill Foundation . Funders have no control over the selection or focus of articles or the editing process and do not review articles before publication. The Times retains full editorial control.

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Growing fears in UK and US of a secret nuclear deal between Iran and Russia

Intelligence suggesting new nuclear cooperation between iran and russia adds to concerns over tehran’s rising uranium stockpile, article bookmarked.

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The UK and the US have reportedly discussed their shared concern that Russia provided nuclear secrets to Iran in exchange for ballistic missiles for its Ukraine war.

Prime minister Keir Starmer and US president Joe Biden discussed the fact that Iran and Russia are strengthening their military cooperation during a summit in Washington on Friday, which also covered other key issues around Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine , including Kyiv’s use of Western long-range missiles to hit targets deep inside Russia.

Mr Starmer and Mr Biden discussed intelligence pointing to a deal that would see the Kremlin providing Iran nuclear technology, sources on the British side told The Times.

If confirmed, such a deal would be especially alarming as Tehran is advancing its programme of uranium enrichment – a step towards developing a nuclear weapon.

Ukraine’s Western allies have claimed that Iran has supplied short-range ballistic missiles to Russia and the weapons would likely be used in the war against Ukraine in the coming weeks. The United States, Britain, France and Germany hit Tehran with more sanctions, condemning its “escalatory” move.

Iran has denied supplying weapons to Russia, rejecting the claims as “completely baseless and false”. Russia has not denied the reports directly, instead responding by calling Iran an “important partner” and saying their cooperation was only deepening.

Early last week the US secretary of state Antony Blinken  told reporters in the UK at a press conference alongside foreign minister David Lammy that Russia had recently acquired new ballistic missiles from Iran.

He warned about Russia sharing secret nuclear data with Iran – a factor that could have implications for both Israel and the US.

“Russia is sharing technology that Iran seeks – this is a two-way street – including on nuclear issues, as well as some space information.”

“Dozens of Russian military personnel have been trained in Iran to use the FATH-360 close-range ballistic missile system, which has a maximum range of 75 miles. Russia has now received shipments of these ballistic missiles and will likely use them within weeks in Ukraine,” said the US’s top diplomat.

Iran agreed to stop pursuing nuclear weapon development as part of a 2015 deal in exchange for sanctions relief from the US and other countries. But the agreement broke down after then-US president Donald Trump pulled out of the deal in 2018.

It’s unclear how much technical expertise Tehran currently has to build a nuclear weapon or how quickly it could do so. However, collaborating with experienced Russian specialists would likely accelerate the process.

The potential deal is expected to increase pressure on the US and UK to allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles – Britain’s Storm Shadows and US ATACMS – to strike military targets inside Russia. It was a key topic discussed during the Washington summit but no decision was announced.

At least five former Conservative defence secretaries – Grant Shapps, Ben Wallace, Gavin Williamson, Penny Mordaunt and Liam Fox – as well as ex-prime minister Boris Johnson, have called on Mr Starmer to ease restrictions on Ukraine’s use of Storm Shadows, though they also depend on US cooperation to be fully effective.

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The U.S. Is Playing Nuclear Chicken in Ukraine

The decay of the post–Cold War bilateral nuclear order has made escalation in the Ukraine war a risky prospect.

Ukraine has been lobbying hard for the lifting of all restrictions on weapons use. During the recent visit, Ukraine’s Defense Minister Rustem Umerov identified a number of Russian airfields within range of U.S.- and European-provided long-range weapons, and Kiev is now seeking the green light to take the conflict to the next level. Zelensky himself will travel to Washington this month to present Biden with a “victory plan” that will reportedly outline Kiev’s path to achieving its war aims. Such a plan will undoubtedly include the acquisition and use of more long-range weaponry with offensive capabilities for striking Russia proper.

As of right now, it hasn’t happened. The likely reason is that even our otherwise myopic policy makers understand that Kiev’s dire situation on the battlefield leaves it with one strategic option: getting the United States more involved. Moscow has subsequently been signaling that the threshold between proxy war and open engagement has been reached. Whether this threshold will be crossed is dependent on the decisions arrived at in the halls of Washington (and perhaps Brussels) over the next several weeks. 

The present peril has been significantly exacerbated in the past several weeks by reported changes to the respective nuclear strategies of both Russia and the United States .

As Ukraine has lobbied for further long-range capacities, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov took the occasion to further chide the West for “playing with fire.” The United States was “asking for trouble" by allowing for strikes on Russian territory, he stated, and it would be irresponsible of those “entrusted with nuclear weapons” to engage in such reckless brinkmanship.

Russian media also reported , following Lavrov’s announcement, that the Kremlin had now decided to “refine” the country’s nuclear doctrine in light of such provocative and escalatory behavior. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov confirmed the ongoing changes as well, citing Russia’s “Western adversaries’ escalation course in regards to the special military operation.”

Current Russian doctrine states that nuclear weapon use is allowed either in retaliation for a first strike by an enemy or if there is an existential threat to the Russian state. The doctrine also states that an attack on Russian facilities responsible for a nuclear response are treated as acceptable justification for nuclear deployment. Kiev has already launched drone strikes against nuclear EWS (early warning system) assets in Russia’s southwest in the recent past. Given the prospect of Western-supplied long range weaponry, it seems reasonable that the Kremlin is signaling a heightened readiness to respond in case such attacks should continue to expand in both frequency and intensity.

As a part of his statements on nuclear doctrine, Lavrov subsequently ridiculed Washington’s belief that it can maintain an open-ended proxy war with the express intention of weakening the Russian state, degrading its military capabilities, and encouraging regime change while still pretending to “sit on the sidelines.”

As things currently stand the Ukrainian fighting position in the east appears increasingly precarious. Kiev is in desperate need of changing the strategic dynamics of the conflict, which currently favor Russia’s industrial production capacities and its ability to keep fresh men cycling into frontline units. One of the intentions behind Kiev’s ongoing Kursk offensive is to reassure its allies in their support of the Ukrainian war effort, and subsequently use any alleged success to lobby for the expanded use of Western-supplied weapons. For instance, Ukraine’s former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba recently stated that the “biggest problem” facing Ukraine was the role of “the concept of escalation in decision-making processes among our partners.” Zelensky himself has regularly argued that Putin’s “redlines” are mere bluffs designed to scare the United States from providing Ukraine with the means to win the war.

But this is only logical if Russia views the commitment to its newly annexed territories and the neutrality of Ukraine as negotiable positions, rather than existential considerations for the Russian state. All signs point to the latter being the case. Putin has continually referred to his readiness to use “all available means” to protect Russia and its territory, including, in October 2022, at the state ceremony formalizing the annexation of the four eastern oblasts—Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.

Betting on Russia bluffing is a risky gamble. It is no coincidence that Russian media is seizing on recently released reports of the Biden administration’s “Nuclear Employment Guidance” to warn that the U.S. is seeking to “increase its deployment of nuclear weapons after existing limitations under a bilateral reduction treaty with Russia expire in February 2026.”

Some of the details of this NEG were also recently covered in the New York Times as well. Washington’s recalibrated “deterrent strategy to focus on China’s rapid expansion in its nuclear arsenal” is intended to address a world in which the nation’s enemies are coordinating to undermine America’s international position. China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are all identified as nuclear-armed states that could pose a unified threat to the United States. The new strategy therefore aims to provide a framework for effectively responding to coinciding crises across multiple regional theaters that include the potential use of both nuclear and nonnuclear weapons. Yet it is of course Russia—the country with the most nuclear warheads in the world—that is singled out as the most irresponsible actor in international politics.

The Times quotes foreign policy pundit Richard Haass, who stated that the West is “dealing with a Russia that is radicalized,” and that it is therefore no longer safe to discount the use of nuclear weapons in a conventional conflict. The operative term in this statement is, of course, “radicalized,” implying a normative framework for right—rational, even—action from which Russia has subsequently departed. Quoting a nuclear strategist from MIT, the Times reports that it is now the West’s “responsibility to see the world as it is, not as we hoped or wished it would be... It is possible that we will one day look back and see the quarter-century after the Cold War as nuclear intermission.”

While both countries played their role in this process, the United States certainly took advantage of its position of relative strength following the Cold War to increase tensions. This was a missed opportunity, as that same position could have allowed for it to take a very different track in promoting international security and non-proliferation.

One of the first truly provocative actions that had important implications for nuclear doctrine was the decision by the Bush administration to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002. Despite the fact that it had been in place since 1972, the White House argued at the time that the treaty was no longer workable since “longer-range ballistic missiles” were being used as tools of “blackmail and coercion” against the United States by rogue actors. Russia was explicitly not included in the latter category, since it was assumed that they too were undergoing the process of surrendering their rights of national self-defense and political sovereignty.

Anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems provide defense against the second-strike capabilities of other nuclear armed states; this is of paramount consideration particularly for Russian defensive doctrine, since not only does the U.S. maintain a massive military presence on the European continent, but any such outbreak of hostilities would inevitably carry the risk of bringing the full weight of NATO against the Russian state as well. In other words, the guarantee of second-strike capabilities on the part of Moscow ensured equilibrium, since it provided a means of responding to—and thus deterring—a Western first strike. This is also particularly important because the United States continues to maintain a first-strike option as a part of its own nuclear doctrine.

For its part, the United States argued that its abrogation of the treaty was actually in Russia’s interest, too. To quote the official justification provided in 2002, “The Cold War is over.” Moscow would now be expected to work with the United States in confronting the rogue actors of the world. While this may have made sense at the time, it quickly became apparent that it would be the transatlantic elite alone led by Washington who get to define what constitutes a “rogue actor.” The latter turns out to be an inherently expansive category and is largely qualified by a refusal to integrate into the supranational framework of globalized liberal democracy. This reaffirms the line of reasoning and conclusion mentioned above: Moscow’s concern with nuclear deterrence was no longer to be considered as legitimate or reasonable.

The ABM treaty withdrawal was then followed by the planned construction of the ballistic missile defense systems in Poland under the Aegis Ashore program , a part of the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense framework run by the U.S. Missile Defense Agency. After a temporary delay, Aegis Ashore was made operational in Poland as a part of the “larger NATO missile shield” in July 2024. Despite initial assurances provided to Moscow that the missiles were intended to protect Europe from threats emanating out of countries such as Iran and North Korea, diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks revealed that —unsurprisingly—Poland was primarily concerned with Russia.

Another Aegis Ashore system has also been operational in Romania since 2016, located at the Deveselu Air Base. The strategic importance of the Black Sea to Russia both militarily and economically cannot be understated, as the current war with Ukraine makes only too clear. 

Given their locations, Moscow has also consistently expressed concern at the ability for such weapons systems to provide offensive strike capabilities, including with the use of nuclear-tipped missiles.

In conjunction with the abandonment of the ABM treaty and the subsequent development of defense concepts such as the Aegis missile defense program was the U.S. withdrawal in 2019 from its INF treaty with Russia. The latter banned ground-launched missile systems with ranges between about 300 and 3,500 miles, and, given the strategic dynamic outlined above, was perceived by Moscow as yet another major escalatory step contributing to a less secure security environment. NATO live-fire exercises such as “ Rail Gunner Rush ” in Estonia in 2020 and “ Fires Shock ” in 2021 also set off alarms in Moscow; for instance, the former utilized “long-range precision fire assets” with ranges up to about 200 miles, while the latter included M270 multiple launch rocket systems simulating attacks on Russian targets.

Russia has of course also had a hand in raising temperatures. Its “Zapad” (Russian for West) military exercise took place most recently in 2021 , and included the simulation of similar long range strikes on NATO targets. While the event occurs every four years, the scope of the exercises has expanded significantly in the past decade or so, from about 20,000 participants in 2009 to around 200,000 in 2021.

And as for the the withdrawal from the INF in 2019, the Trump Administration justified the move due to Russia’s alleged failure to abide by its terms, specifically concerning its deployment of an intermediate-range missile in 2018. Secret Russian military documents leaked earlier this year additionally discuss operating principles for the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons at a threshold below anything previously revealed. The latest report from the same cache of files was released in early August, and revealed that the Russian navy was also identifying targets across all of Europe (although it was allegedly also playing out scenarios for hostilities with other non-European countries like China and Iran). The files are from the years 2008 to 2014, but one would expect that the information around standards for nuclear weapons use remain pertinent.

Still, a great deal of this can nonetheless be traced back to the evaluation of Russian behavior as “radical.” Whereas the provocatory Western actions taken above are presented as in service of ensuring international security, those committed by Russia—whether provocatory themselves or simply responding to NATO and U.S. moves—are seen as fundamentally irrational.

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As a result, tensions have never been higher. The degradation in U.S. relations with Russia and the mutual engagement in nuclear brinkmanship between the two during the past several decades means that this fact carries real danger. The war in Ukraine is no longer simply a regional conflict; what may have started off as a fight over historically disputed lines on the map now has the real potential of spiraling into something much larger.

Of course, the United States doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) want such escalation. The use of Kiev as proxy is perceived to be a relatively low-cost means of weakening a geopolitical rival and ideological obstacle—while also keeping the coffers of defense contractors full and opening up the potential of further exploitation of Ukrainian natural resources—even if that relies upon a cynical strategy of bleeding the Ukrainian nation white. But whether Washington can reel in its dependent is at this point another matter entirely.

The war may end with a significantly more dangerous and unstable security environment, on the European continent in particular and in the world more generally. But conversely, it may also provide opportunity to revisit the subject matter of some of the various treaties listed above. Issues such as nuclear disarmament, arms control and limiting nuclear proliferation, opening up new and better lines of communication between nations that do not depend upon an ideological commitment to any particular regime type, limiting the scope and breadth of military exercises, and other bilateral actions between the United States and Russia specifically that move away from a hair-trigger nuclear threshold are more important now than ever before. But for this to happen, leaders in the Western world must first be willing to take off their ideological blinders.

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